


NOSTER NOSTRI

by spicyshimmy



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-27
Updated: 2011-07-27
Packaged: 2017-10-21 20:17:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 58,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/229334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Originally written in response to a prompt on the Dragon Age Kinkmeme. Three years after the events of Act 3, Anders and Justice are separated, but everything goes wrong in the process. Fenris is a gladiator (sort of) and Anders wears a Saarebas collar (sometimes) and Danarius's summer pavilion factors in heavily. <i>The high peaks of Sundermount were quiet that day. What the others noticed most was the silence—no strain of the bowstring as arrows were notched from high above, nor the hushed shiver of elvhen hunters, not wind, hiding behind the leaves. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	NOSTER NOSTRI

**Author's Note:**

> This is heavily dedicated to every anon who commented and cheered it on, and also the wonderful Naiadestricolor on tumblr, whose brilliant, beautiful art was a boost of inspiration always! Thank you so much. <3

The high peaks of Sundermount were quiet that day. What the others noticed most was the silence—no strain of the bowstring as arrows were notched from high above, nor the hushed shiver of elvhen hunters, nor wind, hiding behind the leaves. _Watch your step, Shem. You don’t know how many Dalish arrows are trained on you right now._

If Anders strained, he almost thought he could hear it, the air itself remembering the words that should have been.

But then, that was his life these days: straining to hear something familiar, even no more than a whisper, and met with the precursor to unfamiliar silence.

He’d grown so used to it, the running commentary, a second line of thought concurrent to his own. Images and impulses along with the words themselves, both thought _and_ voice. _Justice._ Or Vengeance. Or himself. Whatever it was.

But like the Dalish who’d once been camped on Sundermount, he was absent now. Somewhere else. And with time, even the memories faded to nothing more than a dull throb, a twinge of regret, what he was supposed to expect but didn’t receive.

Anders clenched his fingers around his forearm. They shouldn’t have come back here, to this place in the Free Marches, so close to Kirkwall. So close to the past they’d fled.

And with good reason. They really weren’t exactly hometown heroes, at least not to the people who counted.

‘Are you ready?’ Hawke asked, and Anders shuddered back into the present, a sudden wind picking up and snapping at the feathers on his shoulders, pulling his hair free from its loose cord. He scrambled to hold it back, while Merrill wrapped her arms across her chest in the distance, warding off the chill. Beside her—Anders glanced nervously from companion to companion, their loyalty to Hawke remarkable, and also incomprehensible, and often _depressing_ —Isabela pretended to scrape something off the bottom of her boot, and Varric shielded his eyes, squinting up into the narrow cloud cover, the few pale glints of sunlight streaking slim through the gray. Carver stood beside him, brittle posture and tight mouth, and a long way away, bracing himself for a magic far stronger than the type he normally had to hate, was Fenris, already beginning to sing with lyrium anxiety.

Sometimes, it was the only thing that focused Justice, drawing his attention back to the mortal figures ranged before him. People, not ideals. Which was unfortunate, because then Fenris would say something, the lyrium pulse leading up to it, like a giant glowing arrow saying _HATE ME!_

And so Justice did.

But as inconvenient as it all was, as terrifying, Anders had grown accustomed to it, to _all_ of it. He didn’t know what he’d be without it, _who_ he’d be, and he felt the corner of his eye twitch.

‘You did what he—’ Hawke paused, biting at the side of his mouth, his chapped lower lip. It was a childish gesture, something that would have been more at home on a younger man’s face, one of the little relics that remained from his first year in Kirkwall, when he _was_ a younger man. Then, he softened. ‘You did what _you_ planned on. But it’s over now. We’ve found a way.’

Hawke had stuck by him, Anders supposed. And also, this should have been what he wanted. Somewhere inside him, he could acknowledge that, and he owed Hawke as much, and even the others, who’d _stayed._

‘Besides,’ Hawke added, ‘it’s not as though you can go around doing the same act all the time. Eventually, _someone’s_ going to get tired of it. _You’ll_ get tired of it. It’s been a good, long run, Anders. Now it’s time to let it go.’

Merrill reached out, gesturing him closer to the altar. They’d scoured the world, gathering information, gathering ingredients. They’d traveled as far as Tevinter; Anders and Fenris had argued so many times on Isabela’s re-appropriated slaving ship that by now they might as well have had a script for each day of the week. Merrill was a master bo’sun, Varric was their faithful mascot, and Hawke had finally stopped getting seasick. Or at least he’d finally stopped _talking_ about getting seasick, which Anders could recognize were two different things.

The loam and moss sunk, springy, beneath his boots as he stepped forward. He half-expected Justice to come roaring back. At least a fond goodbye would have been nice. _Something._ Justice had to know what was happening—but maybe he was ready, too.

Spirits. Demons. You never _could_ take them out in public. They all thought basic manners didn’t apply.

‘You know, in case this doesn’t work, and you’re all just here to finish me off…’ Anders began, wetting his lips, laughing weakly.

‘Putting you out of your misery, you mean?’ Varric asked.

There was something about him Anders found comforting; he told the kind of lies a man like Anders could understand, but exhibited brutal honesty when Anders needed it most. Varric patted Bianca at his back.

Of all of them, that golden weapon had made it through everything looking more or less exactly the same. No scratches, which Anders took to mean no wrinkles. _She hasn’t aged a day, Varric,_ Anders thought of saying, and felt the corner of his eye twitch again.

‘If anybody tries,’ Varric said, an assurance, but also a warning.

‘Really, Anders,’ Hawke added. ‘I’m wounded. After all this time? The sheer stupidity of doing it _now_ rather than sometime far earlier is probably what offends me most.’

He was smiling. Anders took hope in that.

Merrill unstoppered a bottle of something—ah, yes; Anders remembered: powdered dragonsbone, collected from real bones of dragons, so many frozen mountaintops and steep climbs, fingers blistered from the cold, tiny fires sparking out in the bitter dark. And it was better than the entrails they’d collected, from sea-beasts and deepstalkers and other rare fauna desperate to keep their small intestines where they were, inside their own bodies, not on the flat-edge of Fenris’s two-handed sword. Years of searching, years of hard work, years of fighting three-headed creatures that spat fire with one tongue and acid with another and boiling oil with a third, and Anders supposed he owed it to everyone to try.

He owed it to himself. Even if he had no assurances whatsoever he was actually going to live through this or not.

He’d been so prepared to die once. Why was it so much more difficult to summon that willingness now?

‘I know what I’m doing,’ Merrill promised.

 _What about the Keeper?_ Anders wanted to ask, but he recognized it might be somewhat hurtful, a new strategy he was working on in which he sometimes chose not to say whatever came into his head. He kept his thoughts to himself, and stepped forward to the altar stone. Lichen grew white around the base, in the weathered grooves and cracks, and a tiny bug skittered over the surface, cleverly choosing to flee the immediate area.

‘Now, Fenris,’ Merrill said. ‘I’ll need you to hold him down.’

The press of Fenris’s sharp armor at Anders’s back awoke an age-old instinct—that _HATE ME!_ sign once again—and the smell of the lyrium was like a lure, drawing Justice to the surface. Anders only had a moment to panic, Merrill chanting low and steady in ancient elvhen beside them, before the rushing of blood and impulse howled through his ears, dragging him down to the bottom of some deep, dark well.

That was the last thing Anders remembered, alongside Fenris’s startled shout.

*

When he woke, it honestly came as a surprise to him. Two eyes, blinking to accustom themselves to the murky darkness, but at least he _was_ awake—and instinctively, he knew that deserved special mention. Awake, and not blind, but there was still room for panic.

The collar was the first thing he noticed—first _and_ second thing. It was difficult _not_ to, what with it being clasped large and heavy around his throat, stretching from his collarbone to his chin. Anders felt its width and breadth with clumsy fingers; his hands were trembling with nerves.

The thing was cool to the touch—made of metal, then—and fitted for a lead like a qunari _saarebas._

‘Hawke?’ Anders ventured, sending the lone word out into the dark like a small beacon of hope. His voice reverberated weakly off the stone walls. He didn’t want to think about it—something rattled in his chest, as though he was a man made of metal instead of soft flesh and solid bone—but he couldn’t ignore the evidence in front of him. If this _was_ the Aeonar—if they’d been caught and imprisoned at last—then there was a chance that Hawke, as a fellow mage, might be in the same cell with him, or at least the next one over.

But there was no reply.

‘Varric?’ he ventured. Again, the echo of his own voice greeted him, followed by silence.

Something must have gone wrong with the ritual. A bit obvious, a bit simple, but there it was.

Anders shifted his shoulders, attempting to rise despite the weight bearing down on them, a swoop of steel digging into his throat as he swallowed. The sound of slinking metal followed him, and he nearly lost his balance as the chain attached to the _back_ of his collar pulled slack. Anders coughed, then rubbed his neck—or tried to. His fingers brushed up along the topmost link, clanking against the fused metal plate, and he traced the collar from top to bottom instead, doing his best not to panic.

‘…Merrill?’ he tried next, hoarsely. He wasn’t hopeful, but then it was so long since Anders had ever _been_ hopeful that he wasn’t confident he’d recognize the feeling, if he harbored it again.

There was no reply—nothing from Hawke or Varric or Merrill, or anyone else, for that matter. Not _even,_ Anders realized, from the one person who was always with him. Justice had been quiet ever since Kirkwall—quiet, but never completely _absent._ If anything was going to bring him boiling to the forefront again, like a dead fish floating to the surface of Lake Calenhad, it would be the _injustice_ of being taken to the Aeonar, surrounded by templars and all the other vile measures set in place to keep mages from their freedom.

The moment Anders woke, he should have been awash with Justice’s outrage, that familiar voice telling Anders what next step they had to take, what _had_ to be done, so that mages might at last be free. Themselves included. _Himself_ included.

Anders shook his head, no easy feat.

Instead, there was only silence and the darkness. Anders was alone with his chain and his collar—alone, quite possibly the worst thing to be—and he clenched his hands into tight fists to keep them from shaking. ‘Steady there, Anders,’ he murmured to himself, well aware that this was only the first step on the road to total madness. At least, when he muttered to himself before, he was muttering _to_ someone: an old friend, a familiar abomination. ‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as it seems.’

As if the Maker wanted to prove him _personally_ wrong—as though Andraste herself had it out for one rebellious little mage, and who could blame her?—there was an immediate crash from the next room over, wood splintering as it met with unforgiving rock. Anders started forward on instinct, then jerked back with a wet _hurk_ when he remembered he was chained in place.

Or rather, when the chain reminded him.

He didn’t know whether to call out or to remain silent, whether the commotion was a rescue attempt or a templar search party. Then again, he _was_ already chained up, and Justice wasn’t answering, and he was in solitary. What was the worst that could happen, beyond what had happened already?

‘Heey!’ Anders called, before his brain could come up with a neat little _list_ of the actual worst things, worse than this, because doing that was a habit, a hobby of his lately. ‘Hello! Is someone out there? And…would they like to come in _here_ , perhaps?’

There was another, more subdued crash, and the sound of wrenching metal. Anders flinched, but didn’t back down. He swallowed instead, waiting out the interminable silence that followed—which was nearly as unbearable as the silence in his head, only his own thoughts to keep him company, not even the murmurs of his magic to fill the quiet.

Any other man might have been grateful. But Anders found he was trembling.

Finally, with a thud and a protesting shriek of rusting iron, someone threw the latch on his door and pushed it open. Anders squinted, raising a hand to shield his eyes from the sudden shaft of light.

Even half-blind, he recognized that silhouette. There was only _one_ man among their companions who was quite so spiky.

‘ _Fenris?_ ’ Anders said, all too aware that he was staring. Squinting, really. _Trying_ to understand all this.

It was merely that in the short time he’d had to envision a rescuer, Fenris had most definitely _not_ been high on the list. In fact, he hadn’t even factored onto it.

‘Mage,’ Fenris spat. For a moment he seemed on the verge of wheeling around and leaving, but he twitched his lean shoulders together, stalking into the dark, narrow room instead. Anders could see him glowing, the bright veins of lyrium in his skin acting as a makeshift lantern. Was he doing that on purpose? His eyes flicked toward every corner of the room, wary of traps, or enemies, or unexpected pitfalls. It was the precaution of a warrior trained on an unforgiving battlefield, but also the caution of a slave—a relic from a time when _everything_ was danger, and the only defense was advance preparation. For a moment, Anders harbored a flicker of recognition. He’d been like that once. In fact, he rather felt like it _now_.

Then, finally, Fenris turned to face him, and took in the collar around his neck, gaze traveling from that point of focus outward, along the chain that draped along the floor, fastened to the wall. ‘…What is _that?_ ’

‘Don’t you like it?’ Anders asked, his voice on the very cusp of shrill. ‘It’s just a little something I picked up somewhere, you know. Got tired of having Hawke pick out all my jewelry for me in abandoned chests.’

Fenris snorted; he didn’t believe in jokes during a time of obvious crisis, and neither did Anders. At least, he hadn’t, not for a long while, but now that familiar vein of panic was setting in, one that wasn’t silenced by a deeper strength, fastened—much _like_ a ball and chain—to center him at his core. Without that, Anders felt like a ship without a mast, buffeted in a storm. A storm of emotions. The onset of something he hadn’t felt, in its entirety, in so _very_ long.

 _Fear._

‘I don’t…suppose you have a key for this,’ Anders continued, running his hand along the rough chain links. The metal was cold, dinged in spots, like someone had spent a long time tugging at them, probably to no avail. With the collar in place, Anders sensed his magic removed and returned to a place separate from the rest of him—just at his fingertips, but moving more slowly than usual, sluggish and sedate and far too soft. He searched for Justice beyond that promise of electricity and fire, of healing light and arcane force, but there was nothing hidden behind it, only the far wall, no windows, nothing but blackness.

Anders swallowed again, and winced.

He bruised easily. He remembered that now, too. In fact, it was something that bothered him, or something that was supposed to bother him, but didn’t—not when he was running on raw strength, somehow more than his body should have allowed, tapping straight into the energies of the Fade.

‘I know this place,’ Fenris said, instead of answering his question. He seemed to be lingering, unable to move forward from where he stood: bare feet poised on the threshold, veins of lyrium glowing along the tops, before they disappeared beneath his shin greaves. They lit the room well enough, like a human torch, and Anders glanced around nervously, taking it all in.

‘Lovely.’ Anders took a ginger step forward, making an enormous clanking sound as he did so. ‘At least one of us does. Do you plan on actually telling me, or do I have to guess?’

Fenris’s gaze sharpened, focusing on Anders’s face instead of all the rest. It seemed to bring him back to himself, no longer hesitant, merely annoyed—and Anders wondered if he didn’t like hesitant better, unfamiliar as it was to see on that face. He knew he should have been annoyed in return—that _was_ the dance, as far as he understood it—but instead he simply felt _tired_ , another sentiment that hadn’t been given much room for use lately. More, when they were on the run, and especially during their long slog back from the edges of the Imperium, across the Silent Plains, past Nevarra and Cumberland, heading back where they never thought they’d be able to return.

 _So you_ can _go home again, I take it,_ Hawke had said, just to keep them all moving, to keep them all from turning on one another as they might have wanted to, by that point.

Yes; Anders had very nearly been tired then.

Just not this way. That had been a weariness of mind; this was a heaviness of body, only half-explained by the collar around his throat, a collar which hadn’t yet been explained _at all_.

‘This is no game.’ Fenris’s words were as sharp and spiky as his pauldrons. ‘This is the room _I_ lived in once, in _Danarius’s_ summer pavilion.’

Fenris, Anders noted, said the name _Danarius_ the same way Justice said _templar_. It was a funny little coincidence; Anders had no idea how he’d missed it until now. That, and the way Fenris twitched with every fresh pulse of the lyrium—a distracting tic, to be sure.

Anders glanced to the walls, lined with metal but padded with stained cloth, the narrow cot behind him, and the heavy door with its barred window and rusty hinges.

‘Excellent taste, your Danarius,’ he said, anxiety making him giddy. His body might have been heavy, but his brain felt comparatively light; at any moment, it was possible it could float away, like a cloud leaking out of one of his ears. He was, he supposed, being very inappropriate—just not in the way he was usually inappropriate. Rather, it was the way he’d been inappropriate before all that, old instincts returning with an alarming frequency to replace all the impulses that had forced them out of the way in the first place.

It was because of the situation, he told himself. Surely he’d matured somewhat in the past ten years. Panic did things to a man.

So did spiritual possession.

‘He isn’t _mine_ any more than I was ever his,’ Fenris snarled, the wild animal once more, only Anders didn’t feel the need to be personally affronted by it. Neither of them was at their best, and perhaps if Anders could find it in himself to understand Fenris’s motives, Fenris might do the same for him.

 _Ha._ Not bloody likely. But they did have bigger problems, at present.

‘Yes,’ Anders agreed, rather carelessly, but he couldn’t be blamed for that. He wasn’t exactly in the most stable of mental states. Everything just felt so precarious, like a spinning coin about to drop. ‘I’m sure—of _course_ he isn’t. But it’s all just semantics at this point, isn’t it? Now—as much as I hate to repeat myself over _trivialities_ —do you have the key to this monstrosity, or not?’

‘I heard you the first time,’ Fenris snapped, green eyes raking over the collar once more, making Anders all too aware of how it must have looked—not just how it felt. Fenris couldn’t seem to focus on it; perhaps the sight conjured up painful memories. Which was all very well and good for him, but _he_ wasn’t the one wearing the blighted thing _now_. ‘Of course I don’t have a _key._ Slaves are never granted the means of their own release. It would defeat the very purpose of their enslavement.

He twitched, bringing his armored fingers up to pinch the bridge of his nose, and Anders saw something silver sparkling against his wrist, separate from the steel plating of his gauntlets. It was a small key, the pin and shoulder simple, the bow wrought ornately from fine, soft metal. It was fastened to Fenris’s arm by way of a red leather bracelet, small enough that it _might_ have been possible to miss.

But only if Anders was willing to give Fenris the benefit of the doubt.

‘What’s _that,_ then?’ he asked, rather than deliberate any further. The look that passed over Fenris’s face, contempt followed swiftly by confusion, made it all worthwhile.

‘I don’t know,’ Fenris admitted, though it clearly pained him to do so, lowering his arm so that he could observe the key more carefully, delicate in his murderous hand. ‘…It isn’t mine.’

‘ _Maybe_ it belongs to whoever locked me away in this awful little closet,’ Anders suggested. ‘Or maybe it belongs to Danarius. And if you _unlock_ me, I bet we’ll be able to find out twice as fast.’

Fenris scowled like he somehow felt—despite the obvious—that _he_ was the one chained up in this scenario. Or maybe he’d woken this morning with something large and spiky jammed up his rear end. That would have explained so many things. Anders didn’t know; he didn’t necessarily _want_ to know; and, ultimately, he didn’t care. What he _did_ want, more than anything, was to be free of this collar.

Then he wanted to find whoever was in charge of this establishment, Danarius or some other lunatic, and demand some answers.

In one swift jerk, Fenris thrust the key into the lock at Anders’s throat and turned it pointedly, and none too gently, either. The metal groaned, then severed down the middle, springing apart at the hinges, and freeing Anders’s delicate neck from its crushing prison.

Anders couldn’t pull away fast enough, rubbing at his skin where he could already feel it bruising, taking a few grateful gulps and swallows of air, then popping a spectacular crick at the base of his neck. With the collar off, no longer bearing down on his shoulders, he could feel the dizzying rush of his magic as it returned to him, sparkling at his fingertips like a physical charge of electricity, like he’d just rubbed woolly-socked feet over a plush rug.

Fenris averted his eyes, avoiding the need for any awkward thanks, which was what alerted Anders to the fact that he’d been about to thank him. On instinct. One of the old ones again.

 _That_ was different.

‘We should move on,’ Fenris muttered, already following his own advice. It was a miracle he’d stood still this long. A testament, perhaps, to how much being in Danarius’s ‘summer pavilion’ was affecting him. ‘I am eager to resolve the matter of what’s happened here.’

‘Right behind you,’ Anders muttered, knowing it didn’t matter one whit to Fenris _what_ he did—if he followed like a good little mage, or stayed back in that veritable prison cell to rot.

Still, there was a time when Fenris wouldn’t have trusted Anders at his back. As far as he knew, that time had lasted all the way up until _yesterday._

Things were different now, but Fenris—distracted by all this, as Anders was—hadn’t asked about it. Anders rubbed at the back of his neck, more slowly this time, and gentle, healing himself for the sake of comfort rather than necessity. And that, more than anything, proved to him what he’d already known: that Justice was gone, because Justice was never so quiet, nor so indifferent.

Anders steadied himself against a scrolling chair-back; he recognized the architecture as Tevinter in origin, the high columns with their heads carved into petals as they rose to meet the arched ceiling, a large, open window with a fluttering curtain on the far side of the room, beside which little tiles inlaid upon wall spelled out a colorful mosaic. It was sunny beyond that window, and warm, and smelled faintly of a nearby ocean, exactly what a summer pavilion should be. Anders’s skin, on the other hand, was tinged with the scent of sweat on metal, and he felt the dull thudding of his heart, a different sort of panic, coming to him in fits and bursts.

 _Justice was gone now._

He’d known how to walk before Justice, how to look after himself—sort of; possibly better than he had _with_ Justice, though that was up for debate—and he could do it all now _without_ him. In fact, that much had been planned. But the rest hadn’t, unless there’d been something about the ritual Merrill had neglected to tell them.

And if she _had_ been keeping this not-so-insignificant detail from them, he could only hope she’d woken to the same nasty surprise as he had.

Misery did so like company, after all.

*

They’d made it out of the room and halfway down the first flight of wide stairs when they stumbled across Bodahn, of all people.

 _At last_ , Anders thought, though he’d never felt this relieved to see a familiar house dwarf before. Bodahn was someone else other than Fenris, and a relatively friendly face, at that—he wasn’t Hawke, but Anders would take it. As embarrassing as it would be to know less than Bodahn Feddic did, Anders understood he should be grateful if he came across anyone who knew anything at this point. No matter how short or how tall or how bloody talkative they were.

There was absolutely no reason for Bodahn to be there, of course, aside from the reason Bodahn was anywhere at any time. Unfathomable—almost as unfathomable as his son—and Anders took a moment just to marvel at it, the ridiculousness, the very farce. How was it that he hadn’t appreciated it all before?

‘Bodahn,’ he began enthusiastically, feeling the twinge of other memories, countless times passing through the Hawke estate’s front door in Hightown, sometimes furtively, leaving pages of his manifesto on the writing desk and stuffed inside the most popular books in Hawke’s private study. It was hard to believe he’d really done that—and, after a moment’s deliberation, he decided he hadn’t, actually, done it at all. Someone else had done it, and he’d watched, but he hadn’t really _been_ that person. Not entirely. Just a part of him, but not the part that was fully in control.

It all faded in and out, like the memories from a particularly lucid dream. It was starting to make his head hurt, more than his shoulders, and more than his throat.

Bodahn, however, wasn’t as happy to see him as Anders was to be seen by anyone other than Fenris. His eyes widened, and his squat little body froze, and he pointed at Anders over Fenris’s spiked shoulder with a look Anders felt should have been reserved for archdemons.

Then, he screamed.

In the past few years, Anders had been getting a lot of that. Perhaps not with the same pitch and tenor, but the reaction was more or less the same, whether or not it was internalized or externalized or a combination of both. He’d never wanted to know what it was like to hear a grown dwarf shriek like a frightened nug, but there he had it, and he resisted the urge—because he could, now; because it would all have been so very easy—to scream back.

Fenris shielded one of his ears with his hand, turning his face away from the force of the sound as though he thought it was a blast of arcane magic, then stalked forward, never one to be thwarted by the absurdity of a situation.

‘Get a hold of yourself,’ he said. As if it could all be that simple.

Yet with Fenris, one found that it usually was.

‘But _messere_ ,’ Bodahn whispered, cowering behind him, while Anders contemplated letting his knees buckle out from under him to sit right there in the middle of the steps. ‘The mage is— _The mage is free_!’

A little bit of irony in an otherwise unfunny situation. Anders tried to smooth his hair back, out of his face, wary and somewhat hurt. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Which is how it should be, all things considered. Not that I ever planned on an easy retirement, but at least freedom _was_ a part of it. …In a manner of speaking.’

Instead of injecting some much-needed sense into the situation, and into Bodahn’s mind, this rather sane and rational pronouncement served only to terrify him further. He made a noise like that very same screaming nug being dragged off to slaughter—no longer screaming, but whimpering instead, with a different kind of fear, ultimately resigned—and backed away, wringing his hands.

‘ _And_ it was planned.’ Bodahn attempted to sound airy but landed somewhere nearer to miserable. ‘How— How imaginative, messere.’ His gaze moved toward Fenris—toward Fenris’s feet, if Anders was being specific about the details, which he supposed he needed to start if he was ever going to solve anything. Bodahn couldn’t bring himself to lift his eyes all the way to Fenris’s face, the mark of a good servant, perhaps, or at least one clever enough to make it appear he knew, and even _lived_ , his place. ‘If you’re going to punish him, I only ask that you _please_ don’t do it in front of me again, messere. I may not show my years, but I’m getting on in them, you see; another shock like the first time could do me right in, I’m afraid.’

‘A pity,’ Fenris drawled. It was difficult to tell whether all this was affecting him, or rather, _how_ it was affecting him, and what that meant. Anders had never bothered to learn the minutiae of Fenris’s expressions beyond _angry_ and _outraged,_ and the stiff, awkward length of his posture wasn’t a symptom of their newfound situation so much as a constant trait, a dedicated lifestyle. Fenris darted a look over his shoulder toward Anders, almost as if they might band together in the midst of this foolishness, then narrowed his eyes.

No. Of course they couldn’t. That had never been an option.

At least Fenris seemed to be making up his mind to do something—Anders had seen that exact look on the face of countless cats, usually right before they screwed themselves up to make an impossible jump, from the hearth to a faraway chair, from the chair to the top of a book-case.

Anders might not have known Fenris. But he _did_ know cats.

None of this made sense, Anders thought, for probably the hundredth time. He’d lost count, his heart pumping away in an otherwise empty chest. Bodahn was a fixture of _Hawke’s_ mansion in Hightown. There was no reason for him to be here; he’d moved on to Orlais, apparently, according to Hawke over some distant fire in Wildervale. Not to Tevinter, to what Fenris said— _knew_ —was Danarius’s property.

It hadn’t even occurred to Anders that Fenris might have been mistaken about that. In matters regarding his former master, Fenris was never anything but depressingly perceptive.

‘Wait,’ Fenris growled, his words pinning Bodahn in place like an arrow through a hapless stag. The muscles in his jaw flexed in frustration at being forced to sort out what to say, that no one else, not even Anders, was using all the proper words for him, a courtesy that allowed him to remain silent and intimidating, the two things he did best. Aside from killing mages—or really just generally _killing_ , Anders supposed, and to be fair, he’d relied on that glowing fist thing to keep him safe so many times. Just as Fenris had relied on Anders’s skill for healing to do the same. So long as they never talked about it, or acknowledged it, the system worked.

Anders would have filled the role of talkative person gladly— _normally_ Bodahn found him so charming—but apparently the mere sight of him was enough to send the old dwarf running for the Hundred Pillars. That was all right, Anders tried to convince himself. It was what he deserved—what he’d been expecting after the stand he’d made in Kirkwall. It was supposed to be polarizing. It was supposed to make people want to scream, a cheer of joy or a howl of condemnation.

Apparently Anders never got tired of remembering that, even now, a swell in his chest like a bubble, all pressure and emptiness.

But it left them in a rather precarious position, with _Fenris_ being the one to make overtures for them both. Anders couldn’t think of anyone he’d be _less_ comfortable in trusting with his best interests, but these were the cards he’d been dealt.

A shit hand, as usual. Wasn’t that always the way?

‘Yes, messere?’ Bodahn asked. He pulled at the hem of his vest, doing his utmost to return to the forelock-tugging servant, rather than old dwarf with requests, with preferences and feelings.

Fenris hesitated with his entire body. Anders was tempted, for one moment of complete frenzy, to squeeze him like a bellows, forcing the words like so much air from his lungs. Just grab him by both arms, and _push_ the words out.

‘What are you doing here?’ Fenris managed on his own, after a long moment.

Anders supposed it could have been worse.

Bodahn looked puzzled, then brightened as the sun broke through the obscuring clouds in his memory. ‘Ah—! Quite right, messere, I _did_ come seeking you out, didn’t I? So observant, as always. Master _Hawke_ is due to come by at any moment, and I wasn’t sure if you’d woken, or would be requiring anything beyond the usual for his visit.’ He paused, licked his lips, and dared to placate with a smile. ‘ _Wine,_ and plenty of it...?’

 _Hawke_ , Anders thought, trying not to laugh with relief. That name cut to his core like one of Isabela’s well-aimed daggers. Hawke always knew everything; when he didn’t, he had the decency to pretend he did. They needed someone like that. They’d _always_ needed someone like that.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Fenris turn brittle with attention, armored fingers coming together in a fist before he shook them loose.

‘Hawke,’ Fenris repeated, like a small child learning his first words. A vicious child, who’d murder a man swifter than look at him, but the comparison stood nonetheless. And little children _could_ be vicious, too, in the same way Fenris often was. He turned, and Anders cringed instinctively, as though he’d spoken that last out loud. But Fenris’s interest wasn’t in him at all. It rested instead on the grand entry hall below the stairs; he examined it thoughtfully, as though looking hard enough would make Hawke appear out of thin air. Then again, sometimes Hawke did that, a combination of one of Isabela’s miasmic flasks and his own ceaseless tinkering with magic. Their merry leader _did_ like keeping them on their toes. ‘…We’ll be in the sitting room. Tell him to meet us there.’

‘‘Us’…messere?’ Bodahn asked, with a rather unsubtle look toward Anders.

 _That_ was going to get old fast. Old and rather hurtful. Anders rubbed at his sore neck, remembering that awful room upstairs. He didn’t want to go back up there; in fact, he _wasn’t_ going back up there, and that was the final word on the subject. Bodahn could be fussy and intractable, but Anders knew he had it in him to be even more so. And he was twice as big, so it stood to reason that those qualities in him would also be that much larger. They’d win out.

Besides, he needed to see Hawke. He also needed to be the one asking questions of Hawke, and not Fenris, who wasn’t a master of the question-and-answer routine on either end. Hawke could be slippery, a tricky fellow, and if all this was an elaborate prank—a mean one, even by their party’s standards—Fenris was, Anders admitted, going to need his help in divining the truth. But mostly Anders was going to need to take charge.

 _Just_ Anders.

He had no skill for it, no plan, no core of inner strength. If only he had some of that ability of Fenris’s to intimidate, physically—although he did, once, but it came with a price, not quite being in control, and also not quite saying witty things. It absolved him of culpability, in some reassuring ways—but all this was neither here nor there, a fancy distraction from the main event. He was letting himself get away with…himself, and now, he had no excuse, nothing beyond confusion, which everyone suffered now and then, and no one would cut him any slack for it.

Anders stepped in the direction of what he hoped was the sitting room.

Bodahn, of course, cringed at his every movement, maintaining a generous distance. ‘Are you sure about that… _messere_?’ He seemed to be clinging to the word the same way Anders was clinging to his memories: to anchor him amidst a sea of uncertainty. ‘Not…the study, as you prefer?’

Fenris’s face twisted—there were times Anders thought he had no tell at all, the reason for his rather unexpected successes around the campfire whenever Varric brought out the worn old deck, to ease them along their difficult travels. There were times, however, when Fenris wore everything in his expression, the color of his eyes and the tension in his mouth. It was a lesson in contradictions, something that wasn’t subtle—not at all—but rather two wild extremes. And it had infuriated Justice on that level, too, a presence that refused to be one thing or the other.

Then again, Anders got the feeling it had infuriated others just the same, only in a fonder, less explosive way.

‘No,’ Fenris said at last. ‘Not the study, _as I prefer._ ’

There was something in the way he said it that seemed important to Anders. He wondered what it meant, but found he had absolutely no idea.

‘…Of course, messere, of course,’ Bodahn amended quickly, and scuttled toward a nearby door, some sort of side-passage for servants. _Slaves_ , Anders corrected himself internally, if they were in Tevinter. Not servants. Those were rare enough, and they certainly didn’t live in summer pavilions. ‘I’ll get the wine from the study and bring it to the sitting room, shall I? As quick as I can. You won’t even notice I’m gone.’

Then, he _was_ gone, the door shutting silent as you please behind him.

‘He’s wrong,’ Anders said. ‘I do notice he’s gone. Why the sitting room and not the study, Fenris?’

Fenris rounded on him. Anders realized too late it had been a poor tactical maneuver to draw attention to himself so quickly, especially when there were no witnesses, and _especially_ when Fenris’s mouth was that hard slash of a line, his teeth so tight Anders wondered how they weren’t nothing more than a fine powder by now. Anders braced himself. Not for impact—if Fenris had managed to hold off on physical violence for this long, nearly ten years now, Anders trusted him not to lose all restraint just now—but for feeling stupid.

 _Feeling stupid._ Another experience that occurred only in fits and bursts; his capacity for embarrassment had been so diminished, and shrinking ever smaller with time, there but wholly unimportant in the face of nobler emotions, that didn’t have the time or the inclination to be held back by a man’s petty restraints.

 _Embarrassed?_ Anders attempted to make his internal voice sound like Justice’s, but it didn’t quite work. _Humiliated? There is nothing to be ashamed of in this noble cause._ Then he passed a hand over his face, rubbing at the wealth of stubble over his chin.

‘I remember that study,’ Fenris said, not as if the words pained him. It was an admission Anders never would have been able to make out loud, a hint at past experiences that, for the first time since Anders had known him, made his blood run cold. ‘ _Danarius_ took me there to wait on him. To watch him drink his wine.’

It needed no more elaboration—or perhaps it did, but Fenris seemed in no way inclined to give it some. Anders could simply imagine what came next, and without Justice to quell that instinct, his imagination ran wild, in all directions, everywhere he didn’t want it to go and beyond.

Three years—it had been three years since Danarius died, since they fought him in the Hanged Man and left his blood stains with all the others streaked upon the floorboards and the walls. They were probably still there, worn and faded over time, hidden beneath a scatter of sawdust, but absorbed into the grain of the wood. Part of what Corff called the ambiance of the place: you never knew whose remains you were stepping on, a nameless raider who’d found himself in the wrong place or the wrong time, or a Tevinter magister who’d proved, like so many others, incapable of besting Kirkwall’s Champion.

Anders wondered if, in three years’ time, he’d still speak the name _Justice_ in the same way—as though it were inescapable, still a part of him, despite it all being long since buried.

He felt a chill, and Fenris turned toward a different door. ‘This way,’ he said in a tone commanding enough to make it _seem_ like he knew what he was doing, even if he didn’t.

Anders envied that. Justice had it, but he’d taken it with him when he left, alongside a host of other things Anders wasn’t quite ready to begin cataloguing. Instead, he did the only thing he _could_ do, given the very strange circumstances, and followed Fenris obediently in the direction of the sitting room, feeling, more than ever, the weight of that collar around his neck, even though he’d left it in the small room upstairs.

*

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise when the relief Anders felt upon hearing Hawke’s name turned out to be wildly misplaced, but somehow—like everything else—it did.

It was evident from the moment Hawke darkened their doorway, wearing an angular suit of plate mail, a bolt of bright red fabric tied loosely at his neck, that this was _not_ the man Anders and Fenris knew. He wore Hawke’s _face_ well enough, and his beard, and all the little lines of sunlight and hard work and laughter and pain, the streak of darkened blood across the bridge of his nose, but he also bore a handsome, two-handed sword on his back, like the kind his brother Carver favored, and when he arrived, he spread his arms wide, to greet an old friend he missed.

But he hadn’t had the time to miss them. Or at least he shouldn’t have.

‘ _Fenris,_ ’ Hawke said, going straight for the crystal decanter full of rich Tevinter wine Bodahn had obligingly left on a nearby table. ‘Hiding away, as usual. I never have to ask how things are in _your_ neck of the woods. Don’t you ever get the urge to go out and exist among the common folk for awhile? Greet your admirers before they waste away with longing?’

Anders felt his eyes widening despite themselves, despite everything that had happened, despite the dream-like quality of his life since waking. He bit down hard on the inside of his cheek before his eyes could pop out on stalks and drop right out of his head.

Ahead of him, seated alone on a low, cushioned bench that had evidently been built for two, Fenris stiffened. If he _had_ been an animal, he would have doubled in size, back arched, fur standing on end.

Hawke, seemingly oblivious to this attention, threw himself into the chair across from him, crossing his legs ankle-to-knee and letting out a sigh. Then, his eyes flicked from Fenris to just over his shoulder, where Anders was perched on a _much_ less comfortable stool, not one of the more comfortable, low benches, with their fat, embroidered pillows.

He’d only chosen it so Bodahn wouldn’t faint dead away of shock while serving them. But now, ass falling to numbness against the hard, unforgiving wood, Anders couldn’t help but curse his newfound selflessness. There had never been room for all these separate urges before, and it was chaos sorting through them now. Anders felt like a child again, separating which feelings were valid from those that were merely irrational instinct, bound to pass in time, as though they’d never been a part of him at all.

‘Hawke,’ Fenris began, hands clenched into fists on his armored knees. Anders was just surprised he wasn’t standing, _lurking_ or pacing or whatever else he did; even like this, he was poised, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice, the fine coil of that precise tension lacing his muscles. He was also waiting, just like Anders was, for Hawke to drop the act and become the man they knew again.

This charade was no longer amusing in the slightest, even for Anders, who could feel the stirrings of his erstwhile sense of humor returning to him, piece by unavoidable piece.

Even a man— _just_ a man, without the bolstering intolerance of a spirit to guide him—had his limits.

‘Just a moment,’ Hawke said, placing his wine glass on the floor. He shifted in his seat, then unstrapped his gauntlets, making to remove his breastplate next. ‘You should have _warned_ me we were letting him run free in the house again today. I’d have worn something better suited to chasing him, _and_ I wouldn’t have started drinking.’

Anders laughed, because it was obviously a joke, and even men like Hawke needed people to appreciate their punchlines. It very swiftly became apparent, however, that he was the _only_ one laughing, and—even worse—that he’d gone and done that _thing_ again where he drew attention to himself at precisely the wrong moment.

He was really going to have to stop doing that.

 _Bad Anders,_ he thought, in place of having anyone else to do it for him.

‘Oh,’ Anders said, collecting himself. ‘Not funny. Right. I run, you catch—is that the idea?’

‘Fenris,’ Hawke said, his eyes never leaving Anders’s face. Beneath the armor his skin was sweaty, and when he shifted Anders could see the ripple of several muscles he’d never known Hawke to possess—and also some he’d never actually seen on a human body before, Warden-Commanders included in that assessment. ‘You haven’t—oh, I don’t know—hit him especially hard in the head during recent weeks, have you? He seems a little…not all there. I mean, moreso than usual. And I can’t help but notice you…took the collar off?’

‘Who, me?’ Anders asked, recognizing that now was a time to be silent and thoroughly ignoring it. ‘Not at _all_. I’m just so excited to play the game, you see. Shall I keep my robes on, or take them off? You’re reminding me of my glory days in the Fereldan Circle. I never imagined Tevinter would feel so much like home.’

‘Mage,’ Fenris hissed, through gritted teeth. Normally it was a rebuke, an offhand acknowledgment colored with barely concealed disgust. Now, it seemed like something designed more to call Anders back to himself, or remind him that they were in unknown territory, possibly hostile, and babbling might get them both killed.

Clever Fenris.

It wasn’t a combination of words Anders had ever thought before, but there was a first time for everything, even this. Objectively, the elf had managed to make it out of Tevinter, through the travails and the wilds of slavery, to become his own free man. He _was_ clever, about these tense situations at least, a ruthless cleverness that Anders supposed he’d do well to appreciate. And allow it to work, as well; otherwise, it would prove useless for all of them.

Anders pressed his hands in together between his knees. His robes, he realized as he stared at them in the breezy sunlight, were far more wear-worn than usual. Not that they were in the best shape up on Sundermount; they’d seen him through countless leagues of open ocean, over mountains and under mountains both, across open plains and even all the way to Antiva. They’d done a lot of traveling. They’d seen a lot of sights. He’d gone through seven pairs of boots. But there were rips and tears in the fabric now that he didn’t recognize, stains he didn’t want to recognize, portions missing, making him feel almost naked. He rubbed at one with his thumb, tracing the seam of his trousers down to a bandage around his leg, holding them together above a significant rip in the faded fabric. Even the weave of what remained was thin, barely anything holding it all together.

Hawke, by comparison, had none of the travel-dust on his shoulders. His loose undershirt was half open, a bit of sun-darkened skin revealed beneath his throat, dark hair over tight muscle. He looked poised, too, as wary as Fenris on the open road—as wary as Fenris now, who looked between them in a way that Anders wanted, very badly, to trust would help him somehow.

‘A neat trick,’ Hawke said finally, almost appreciative. His hand never left the general area of his weapon, though, hovering just above the pommel. It was a very big sword, the sort Anders acknowledged he probably wouldn’t have been able to lift or even drag along the floor behind him, scraping the pretty tiles along the way. ‘But you know you can’t trust him, Fenris. He _will_ turn on you.’

Anders’s throat dried up before he could laugh, or muster eve a depressed _ha!_ He thought he could remember saying something extremely similar to Hawke once, years ago, the words forming of their own volition. It had been about Fenris then, ostensibly, only Anders recognized it was never really about Fenris so much as it was about everything.

 _You know you can’t trust him. He’ll only turn on you._

Yes; that sounded like him, the not-him he was for so many years, the not-him he wasn’t now. He wished he had the time to come to terms with all this without the mitigating factors distracting him and complicating everything, then admitted to himself that it was probably for the best he _was_ distracted from it. The puzzle was too complex; its roots ran deeper than veins. If he didn’t have something else to focus on there would be only that, the loneliness, the empty bubble, the pressure surrounding it. He needed these voices to fill up that lack of sound. He only wished they were talking more, and perhaps that they might start making more sense.

‘As you can see,’ Anders said, quietly, because no one else was talking—it was Fenris’s turn to speak; not surprisingly, he’d missed his cue—and anyway, someone had to do it, ‘I’m behaving myself.’

Hawke observed him, fingers tightening in the air over the hilt of his two-handed sword. His hand didn’t come down just yet, but his expression of wary scrutiny was at once less and more daunting than Fenris’s outright reprove.

Fenris wasn’t pleased. He probably thought Anders was making things worse. And maybe he was right about that, difficult as it was to admit. But at least he was attempting to move this process along; _somebody_ had to do it. Anders dared, for a brief moment, to look away from Hawke, to try to signal, with his eyes, that they needed information, and they couldn’t get that alone, not with the way Hawke was looking at Anders and the lack of contribution Fenris brought to any given conversation.

‘I didn’t think he could be trained,’ Hawke said, a curiosity to his tone that Anders recognized. It was the same interest he showed over the drakestone and the _sela petrae_ , a thirst for arcane knowledge that was actually quite admirable, but now it was turned toward something sinister, and Anders felt himself shiver.

‘He—’ Fenris began. Again, Anders caught his eye, trying to channel his blossoming panic into wordless direction. Or suggestion—or inspiration—or something that wouldn’t make Fenris bristle. _Think of it like a card game,_ Anders tried to say with his eyes. _Whatever it is Donnic taught you that makes you so good at them, when you beat me all the time._ Fenris blinked, focus narrowing. Then, he turned back to Hawke, leaving Anders unable to determine whether or not he understood any of that as implicitly as Anders had felt it. ‘—is behaving himself,’ Fenris said at last.

Anders released a slow breath of relief.

It wasn’t an outright lie. It was an act, which was technically different. Yet some of the hesitation in Fenris’s voice indicated how much it pained him to do this. Subterfuge wasn’t his strong suit, then. Anders had never thought of him as a subtle person; the armor was indication enough of that. Unavoidable, really. But even Fenris understood now that this wouldn’t be the same as fooling Hawke, _their_ Hawke, even if it looked the same on the outside.

Hawke shrugged. ‘For now.’

‘For now,’ Fenris agreed.

Anders tried not to rock with anxiety. He might not have been the card player Fenris was, but he _was_ wildly more imaginative. He wouldn’t, for example, have just repeated things as Hawke said them; he hoped that wasn’t Fenris’s entire plan, since it very likely wouldn’t get them anywhere at all.

‘I’m surprised he isn’t…angrier,’ Hawke added. Ah: now Anders remembered. He’d underestimated Hawke’s desire, in all situations, to talk. But Fenris, Anders realized, hadn’t forgotten about it. ‘You know—more _vengeful._ ’

‘Oh!’ Anders said, a little more loudly than he meant to. He was still waiting for the accompanying rush of recognition—for _Vengeance_ to respond to some unspoken need that the situation hadn’t called for. He was always doing that. Except for now that he wasn’t. ‘No—I’m not like that anymore, you know. It seems I’ve…’ He hesitated, glancing swiftly toward Fenris, then back to Hawke. ‘…changed.’

Changed like _everything else_ , in the short time Anders had spent asleep. The room he’d woken in was over their heads now, dark and cramped, with that awful collar waiting for him. Hawke wouldn’t _really_ put him back in it, would he?

Even Fenris hadn’t had the heart—or rather, the lack of one—to leave him there.

‘Right,’ Hawke said, lips quirking beneath his dark beard. It was clear he didn’t believe Anders one bit, and equally clear that he was willing to accept the lie for the time being. He also seemed to share the proper sense of humor, a bit dark, occasionally bordering on the macabre, but always… _out there_. ‘Well, it certainly _took_ you long enough. I don’t know how this is going to affect morale among the other slaves, Anders. You were their last holdout.’

‘Beg pardon?’ Anders asked, head twitching like a bird catching sight of a worm. It was evident now that Fenris wasn’t willing to do any of the heavy conversational lifting, and perhaps that was for the best. Hawke was obviously speaking to him as an equal, and thereby as someone who ought to have already known what was going on. By contrast, he was treating Anders a madman who belonged in a saarebas collar. If that was truly the case, it could hardly ruin his dignity to ask a few questions here and there. ‘ _Other_ slaves?’

Hawke’s smile turned indulgent, almost careless as he picked up his wine glass again. ‘Well, not _here,_ unless you count that nattering dwarf amongst them. Fenris doesn’t care much for slaves—but then, he’s rather soft-hearted from our time in the arena, I think.’

It almost sounded affectionate, as though Hawke were saying: _and he takes his tea black every morning_ or _and he always sleeps on the left side of the bed, the silly thing, isn’t it adorable?_ A small, personal detail only a close friend—or someone even closer—would know.

‘ _Soft-_ hearted?’ Fenris snarled, spurred into action by the smallest of insinuations—as though defending his reputation was somehow more important than finding out anything about their situation, or any of the implications made about _Anders_ , for example, who was rapidly revising his opinion of the elf’s usefulness in this particular conversation.

‘Now, now,’ Hawke said, talking a liberal swallow of spirits. From the look on his face, this was an argument they had often. Or, at least, he didn’t seem to regard Fenris’s reaction as anything out of the ordinary. Lucky Fenris, who got to be the same no matter where he went. ‘So many other ex-gladiators feel the same way. Not _me,_ in particular, but some. Of course, they all probably live in smaller houses, ones with no room at all for keeping a large host of slaves, but again, that’s entirely circumstantial.’ He paused to wet his lips, to contemplate his glass. ‘ _Personally_ , I find the odd eccentricity here and there a perfectly charming trait.’ Hawke’s attention turned to Anders, eyes gleaming with private amusement. ‘Do you know, some days I think he wouldn’t even keep _you_ if he wasn’t so honor-bound to hold onto his gifts?’

Fenris shifted in his seat, unconsciously preventing Anders from leaping in to demand further clarification. All this talk of gladiators and slaves was making his headache return, even more demanding than before. And the implication that both Hawke and Fenris had _fought_ as gladiators was further confounding, despite being one of the very clues Anders had hoped, at the beginning of all this, to pick up on.

At least it explained the large, dangerous sword Hawke kept within an arm’s reach at all times, but Anders had never heard of such sport being entertained anywhere, _even_ in the blackened lands of the Tevinter Imperium.

‘Hah!’ Fenris said, a sudden expulsion of breath that made Anders jerk in place. ‘A gift, is it? Would you mock a nuisance and a _bother_ by calling it such? I think constantly about how I would refuse this _gift_ , if I were only given the opportunity to do so.’

 _Fenris, what are you doing?_ Anders imagined himself asking, his inner voice just as panicked as his _outer_ voice had been this morning. While he didn’t yet have the space in his mind to feel personally insulted by this little exchange, there was ample room to feel panicked over Fenris’s blatant lack of regard for social customs.

There was a dangerous air about Hawke that Anders didn’t altogether like. But perhaps that was how everyone saw the Champion—those who weren’t fortunate enough to know him personally, to have seven years of history to draw on and be consoled by. Those private moments that humanized the grand exterior, an actual face behind the mask.

Hawke snorted, leaning forward to brace an elbow on his knee. ‘You’d just up and tell the _Divine_ that you don’t actually _want_ her gratitude for your part in the Exalted Marches, and she can hang onto the most dangerous mage in Thedas herself, is that it?’ He took another gulp of liquor, immune to the horrified silence that had fallen like a pall over the room. ‘I’d like to see that, Fenris. Truly, I would. Tell me, though: have you been using all this time alone to cultivate a sense of humor? It was well spent.’

A loud _pop_ came from the area of Anders’s knees, one of his knuckles pressed too tightly between them. He heard it echo through the room, but neither Fenris nor Hawke turned to look at him.

Anders couldn’t decide if it was better or worse: being no one’s immediate concern, to the point where he might as well have not been there at all. He’d been _so much_ , once, unbearably always the center of at least one person’s attention. At times he’d told himself he loathed the scrutiny. At others, he’d adored it. So much of his particular difficulties with loneliness, his abject fear of it—one year in solitary was part of that, no doubt, and thank the templars, as always, for their assistance—was bound up in Justice, and cured by Justice, sort of, for better or for ill. He appreciated it, at least. He always noticed it, and needed it, whether he wanted it or not.

But despite being the topic of conversation, Anders felt invisible. He was there, but only as reference.

‘Remarkable how he isn’t using his magic,’ Hawke continued, relaxing somewhat. Only then did he turn his gaze back to Anders, but it wasn’t the sort of study one reserved for a living, breathing person—it was more the distant intrigue one wore when observing a display at a reliquary. Something not entirely believable—the ashes of Andraste or whatever it was that was most popular these days—that a half-religious man had trouble outright dismissing, even though his first instinct was to do just that. There was always the possibility that it might be the real thing, and everyone always wanted to hedge their bets when it came to that potential.

Anders felt, from a distant place, the spark of his fingertips, the desire to do something stupid. Maybe, casually, light a curtain on fire, or send a pulse of electricity zinging toward Hawke’s boots. Just to keep him on his toes, and scold him for sounding so cruel.

He didn’t. It was admirable.

No one praised him.

‘He _is_ behaving himself,’ Fenris said. Anders startled, wondering if he’d been able to sense, with his lyrium veins, that sharp pulse of latent magic in the air. ‘…For now, in any case.’

‘You don’t let him out like that while you’re sleeping, do you?’ Hawke asked. He paused to rub at his beard, then pour himself another glass of wine. Anders got the distinct feeling he was about to stand, and circle Anders _exactly_ like he was Andraste’s sacred ashes, or perhaps the bastard brother of so holy a relic—one equally powerful metaphorically, but in the opposite way. The fingerbones of Maferath, perhaps.

‘…No,’ Fenris replied, after some pause. It seemed like more than just one word, somehow, but nothing approaching a full sentence.

Anders couldn’t imagine Hawke carrying on so lusty a conversation with him on more than one occasion. Then again, some men just liked to hear themselves speak. Anders recalled that he was, in fact, one of them. If you let people like that talk, without interrupting, they found you charming, sensitive, and understanding, when all you _really_ were was quiet.

‘So we aren’t chasing him, then?’ Hawke sighed. ‘As long as the Divine doesn’t get wind of it… Fenris, I can’t help but feel that this is all very illegal.’

‘That has never bothered me,’ Fenris replied, in a moment of, Anders thought, unexpected inspiration.

It worked. Hawke smiled, that cheeky thing, hiding it behind the rim of his crystal snifter, a flash of white teeth and a pull of laugh-lines. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You have me there. This is a bit different from fighting dirty in the arena, though. It’s evening the playing field, that’s what it is.’

‘Yes,’ Fenris agreed. He said nothing more than that—because he didn’t have to.

He was better at this than Anders had been prepared for. He put Anders to shame with it.

‘If it’s the sport of the thing…’ Hawke began, then trailed off. For the first time, he managed to look somewhat human, or at least troubled by the whole ordeal. ‘He looks healthier now. Is that what you’re after? Maker knows I’m not one for collars, but it’s better than the alternative, isn’t it? A whole blighted city of Tranquil?’

‘Sometimes I wonder,’ Fenris replied. His voice was far-off, as though he was having the conversation somewhere else, with someone else, or inside his own head, with only himself.

Anders knew all about that.

‘Suit yourself.’ Hawke shrugged, clearly accustomed to it—whatever _it_ was, something innately _Fenris_ that Anders had never before bothered to study, qualities he hadn’t wanted to understand. He had no choice now; everything else was far more unfamiliar, and Fenris himself was the only blessed constant, a moody look and a deep voice, not to mention a scorn that felt like home. ‘I fought beside you then. I won’t fight you now. But sometimes I wonder if you don’t miss the struggle. Challenges like this—letting Thedas’s most wanted criminal run loose in Danarius’s old house... It’s almost like you _want_ Varric to write that biography of you after all.’

 _Varric’s here_ , Anders thought. ‘Varric’s here?’ he asked.

Fenris shot him a silencing look. ‘Why, then, do you suppose I do it, Hawke?’ he asked, to cover up Anders’s indiscretion, and also, to let Hawke explain things for himself.

 _Very_ clever Fenris.

‘To mock their customs, I suppose,’ Hawke replied, after a moment’s pause for thought. ‘The same way they mocked others, once. And yet…’ He quieted, momentarily unable to reconcile whatever it was he thought of Fenris with whatever it was he wanted to think. And then, unable to make _this_ mesh with his reality—a reality in which, Anders was beginning to understand, had something to do with Exalted Marches and collared magisters. It was all supposed to make him despair, and turn that desperation toward fury, but instead it made him breathless, and afraid. ‘You’re a difficult one, I’ll give you that.’

‘Generous of you,’ Fenris said, with a glimmer of something that approached good humor. Anders had seen it only a handful of times, peppered across Fenris’s conversations with _other_ people—chiefly Hawke and Isabela—while he himself remained on the sidelines. Fenris drew in a short breath, the way he often did before setting down a wager in cards—the calm before the big gamble. ‘What _are_ you doing here, Hawke?’

‘As always, your hospitality comes with an incredibly _short_ shelf life,’ Hawke observed, downing the rest of his wine in one last gulp. Anders watched his tan throat bob as he swallowed, a little fletched scar beneath the skin, something he knew, as a healer, had nearly been fatal once. ‘As tempting as it is to see if I can _really_ wear out my welcome once and for all this time… I think I’ll refrain.’ His eyes flicked back toward Anders. ‘If we aren’t having a chase, then I suppose I’ll take my leave. Just wanted to check in—make sure you hadn’t forgotten about dinner tonight.’

‘Dinner,’ Fenris repeated, hands spreading over his knees, fingers outstretched and barbed like a spider’s legs. ‘…Yes. I wouldn’t want to forget something like _that,_ I’d imagine.’

Hawke chuckled, ruffling a hand through his own black hair before smoothing it out again. ‘I _knew_ you’d forget. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find out you’re doing it on purpose. Just come by my place around seven, and bring a bottle of that Agreggio you’re always on about, all right?’

‘Agreggio Pavali,’ Fenris said. He was getting the hang of this now; Anders could tell, even in the midst of being hideously envious.

‘That’s the stuff.’ Hawke snapped his fingers in recognition, gathering up the bits of stray plate he’d shed earlier, like a molting beetle, locking them back on with practiced ease. ‘Be seeing you then, I’d imagine. Oh, and Fenris?’

‘Hawke,’ Fenris replied.

‘ _Don’t_ let him out of the house without that collar,’ Hawke advised, sobering somewhat. ‘I might find your little bouts of mercy charming, but the templars won’t. It’d be a waste to run into trouble after all you’ve accomplished, just on _his_ account.’

Anders felt the familiar rush of fear, like a bucket of ice-water being dumped over his head, at the mention of that familiar topic. _Templars_ , in the Tevinter Imperium. It sounded like the title of one of Varric’s books—a black comedy, probably, something engineered to illustrate the absurdities of life, a lesson beginning with an equally absurd title.

Fear, yes, and a wry anxiety. But, as Anders was coming to expect, there was no accompanying rage, no blind confidence that they _would_ prevail—that there’d be no stopping them, because even if Anders was just a man, Justice was a concept that couldn’t be defeated.

That silence in the place of confidence was a cavity, a dearth, a _punishment_ , the wind whistling through the dark empty caves of Sundermount with nothing to stand in its way.

‘Thank you for your counsel, Hawke,’ Fenris said. He stood, as if hoping to put an end to this visit, once and for all. ‘It is…appreciated, as always.’

‘As always,’ Hawke mimicked, offering Fenris a salute with two cocky fingers. ‘And as always, I’m sure you’ll do just as you please, for all the good it serves.’ He paused by the door, taking in the sight of Anders once again. ‘I’ll never understand what you’re trying to prove.’

With graceful, clanking strides, Hawke was gone before either of them could wonder just who that last cryptic statement had been directed toward, or what it _meant_ , in the grand scheme of things.

*

Anders and Fenris remained together in the sitting room long after Hawke was gone, the sound of his bootfalls fading, punctuated by the slamming of a distant door—just long enough to be certain that Bodahn wasn’t about to bustle in with more wine, or an unexpected sandwich, or a fruit and cheese plate he’d thrown together from various scraps lying about the kitchen, ‘just in case the master felt hungry.’

To Anders’s immense relief, they were left alone. Bodahn, it seemed, had been far more enthusiastic as a servant than he was as a slave.

‘ _So…_ ’ Anders said, after what felt like hours, breaking through the silence like an intrepid adventurer. ‘You were wrong about this house belonging to Danarius, weren’t you—because it seems to belong to _you_. Isn’t that funny?’

Fenris shot him a brittle look, eyes laced with something bright; it looked like anger, or anger’s more fidgety cousin annoyance. ‘It would seem that this house is not the _only_ thing that belongs to me, mage. If Hawke—’ That gave him pause. ‘—if _that man_ can be trusted for his information.’

‘I can’t think of any reason he’d have to lie to us,’ Anders said. ‘Unless he was put off by your forgetfulness, or perceived my charming nature as complete _lunacy._ ’

Fenris grunted, like _he_ was perceiving Anders’s charming nature as complete lunacy right that very moment. ‘And now we’re invited to dinner.’

‘ _You_ were invited,’ Anders pointed out. ‘Can’t I just stay home with the other slaves and oh, I don’t know, put my feet up?’

‘Slaves do not ‘put their feet up,’’ Fenris informed him. Anders suspected he was privately boggling at how little Anders understood of the world, or at least _this_ world. Fenris’s world—in a manner of speaking—or rather, the world he’d left behind.

Unable to stop himself—he recognized the early onset of a nervous habit when he saw one, but he knew he couldn’t fight it off even if he tried—Anders lifted his fingers to his throat, the bruised flesh beneath his chin and jaw, the now-faded line where the hinge of the collar had rested, digging into the side of his neck, just over his pulse. He felt that pulse now, remarkably steady, but racing the moment he noticed it, a dim reminder of his own renewed capacity for self-awareness.

Fenris, Anders realized, was watching him, his tactile study of an unfortunate situation.

Anders dropped his hand to his lap, fidgeting with an unraveling length of thread from the hem of his sleeve. ‘I suppose I _could_ scrub the floors,’ he said sadly. ‘But I don’t like it when my fingers get all pruny.’

Fenris scoffed, a necessary reaction, one Anders almost concluded he _needed_ to hear. Fenris, at least, was more than willing to fill the shoes of relentless disapproval in Anders’s life, and Anders very nearly leaned closer to him, to bask in it.

Now _that_ , he told himself, was complete lunacy.

‘Nonetheless,’ Fenris said, ignoring Anders’s terrible suggestions with the same brutal efficacy he’d displayed before, with Hawke, ‘something is amiss.’

Anders felt a well of resentment rush upward through his chest to fill the void of other emotions, flooding him from the center of his gut to the tips of his fingers. ‘That’s it?’ He couldn’t keep his voice from getting shrill. ‘ _That’s_ what you’ve decided? Someone wearing a face like Hawke’s face and a body _almost_ like Hawke’s body tells us there’s been an Exalted March, that you’re a hero of the Tevinter Mage Slave Imperium, that _I_ was given to you—Thedas’s most wanted criminal—as one of those slaves, by the templars—no, by the Divine herself—and all you can come up with is: _something is amiss?_ ’

‘More than one thing is amiss, then,’ Fenris replied. If ever there was a time for someone to display a heretofore unknown penchant for gallows humor, Anders could recognize—beyond his personal stake in the matter—now was probably the most successful. He gaped at Fenris because he could do nothing else, and then, deflating, sat back on his stool, the flat, polished wood hard enough to make him wince.

‘You made a joke,’ he said.

Fenris remained silent. He was clearly the infuriating type of person who let a joke speak for itself, and _didn’t_ feel the need to start explaining it when he saw no one was laughing.

‘You don’t do that around me,’ Anders continued. ‘… _With_ me. We don’t—do that.’

‘No,’ Fenris agreed, employing the same tactic on Anders as he had with Hawke. Anders knew it, had seen it in action, could analyze it from start to finish and recognize _exactly_ how it worked. But it still had a compelling sort of effectiveness, a force he couldn’t resist.

‘And now really isn’t the time to start,’ Anders said, putting his head in his hands. He let out a little groan, then fell silent, breathing in the scent of lingering metal on his palms, acrid and meaningful and unpleasant.

‘I wasn’t going to mention it,’ Fenris said.

Anders wanted to ask him if he’d ever even _entertained_ the thought of panic, or if those instincts had been beaten out of him through the years of misery he’d hinted at so often—not just in all he said, his contempt for mages and their magic, but also, admittedly, in the way he moved, wary of everything but never quite _above_ all of it. Looking back through his fingers, peering out at Fenris from the bars they formed in front of his eyes, Anders saw only shadow playing over armor, Fenris sitting staunchly, and refusing to squint into the sunlight.

‘So I’m a slave,’ Anders said finally. It sounded rather similar to _something is amiss_ , as far as pointing out the obvious.

Fenris’s jaw tightened, powerful muscles clenching over bone. ‘I am told it happens.’

‘And I’m… _your_ slave,’ Anders continued, just to be sure _they_ were sure, at least of the key details.

‘A thought which disturbs me more than you know,’ Fenris replied.

From the tone of his voice, Anders suspected he might have been able to wager an accurate guess.

‘Well then.’ Anders clasped his hands together in his lap. ‘There you have it. That ritual—it must have gone wrong. I mean, Merrill, _that rascal_ , you know how she can be, head in the clouds all the time, occasionally quite evil—or perhaps the supplies were wrong—or the steps unclear, or your lyrium too potent, or _something_ … The very same something that’s amiss now, I’d wager. I suspect when it comes to ancient rituals of enormous power everything has to be exact—and you know how Sundermount is. Finicky. Difficult. Unpleasant at the best of times, and…’

Fenris was watching him again. Anders had to stop talking, to make sure he wasn’t touching his throat without noticing, before he realized that had nothing to do with the reason for Fenris’s scrutiny. No; it was something else, something that had started when Anders said _ritual_ , and the build of suspense made a hard lump form deep in his throat.

‘Don’t make me say it,’ Anders murmured, barely above a whisper.

Fenris, of course, said nothing at all. He simply waited, which was worse than anything else.

‘…Fine.’ Anders gripped his hands together so tightly his knuckles turned white, his fingernails blue. ‘It _did_ work. Obviously. In a manner of speaking. When that— When Hawke— When _whoever that was_ mentioned templars, I didn’t even… I just felt afraid,’ he finished lamely, wishing he could have been having this little heart to heart with anyone but Fenris, if only for the sake of someone else’s pride. He didn’t feel it, not in the same way, not with any sort of urgency. It was back to embarrassment now, not principles, a very human desire to avoid humiliation.

But that would be rather hard to do with all this collar and slave business, anyway. Anders didn’t know who he was trying to fool. Certainly not Fenris. Probably himself.

‘I see,’ Fenris murmured, his tone betraying nothing—certainly not approval at Anders’s confession, which was, he had to remind himself, what everyone had been hoping for out of Merrill’s little ritual. Even if the _aftermath_ was leaving certain things to be desired, at least one thing had gone right. Although currently it felt so very wrong. ‘So you are no longer an abomination?’

‘Only in terms of my personality,’ Anders quipped. Because honestly, someone had to. ‘And my fashion sense, apparently. Do you really let me _wear_ this, Fenris? It’s falling all to pieces.’

‘ _I_ have allowed nothing,’ Fenris intoned, rounding on Anders at last. ‘I do not _keep_ slaves.’

‘It seems that you do,’ Anders said, more mildly now. That was always the way with him: all the energy he’d built up while antagonizing someone always dissipated the moment they _actually_ responded to it. Justice was different. Justice bit back. ‘ _I’m_ not a slave, but I woke up this morning collared like dear old Ketojan right before he went and immolated himself, so what can I say? The entire concept behind an Eluvian is communicating with places and times _other_ …than what one is used to. I suppose it’s possible that some _other_ Fenris kept another Anders as his slave. In a world where there was an Exalted March on Tevinter which absolutely did _not_ happen to us. I’d remember something like that, Fenris. I’m sure of it.’

‘Things are not as they seem,’ Fenris agreed. Another _something is amiss._ Deceptively deep; deceptively simply; unfortunately true. He stood suddenly; Anders felt something uncomfortable pop in his neck as he tried to follow him with his gaze. ‘Go upstairs. I need to…’ Words failed him—and not for the first time—as he looked around the room, taking in what must have been familiar sights, though now their meaning was turned on its head. Anders couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for him; he couldn’t imagine what _he’d_ do if he woke up in the Gallows as Knight-Commander Meredith, for example. At least he recognized, faintly, the person he’d become as someone he once was. Fenris didn’t have that luxury. ‘I intend…to look around.’

For once, Anders didn’t feel the need to come back at him with a witty observation. It wasn’t Justice who brought him down, but Anders himself this time, knowing where the line was, and refusing to cross it.

 _Good Anders,_ Anders thought to himself, since there was no one around to say _that_ to him, either.

He didn’t need to speculate too far in order to realize why Fenris might want to be alone for something as cursory as exploration of the house. He knew it better than Anders did, and now he could wander its geometric hallways without feeling like an outsider, or a prisoner, or both. If Fenris ran into Bodahn alone, there was less chance of him screaming again, or worse, assuming something was amiss, and trying to tackle Anders while beating at him with a candlestick.

Privately, in the part of him that was far too clever for its own good, Anders wondered whether Fenris wasn’t going to comb all the rooms for evidence of Danarius’s treachery, just to make sure his old master wasn’t lurking behind the drapes or in an old cellar. Anders might have laughed at Fenris’s paranoia—the magister was dead; Fenris had torn his heart out personally—if he hadn’t known what it was like to feel the cobwebs of old memory clinging to his skin. They taunted and tickled at the worst of times, turning to nothing more substantial than shadow when he tried to swipe them away.

He wouldn’t bear witness to Fenris’s need to reassure himself. It would only make them _both_ feel awkward after.

Instead—like the obedient slave he was in this nightmare world, where Hawke laughed at mage hunts and templars roamed the Imperium’s streets—Anders rose to his feet and promptly retired to the master bedroom upstairs, avoiding, at all costs, the holding cell beyond.

*

It felt like an age until Fenris finally rejoined him. In that time, Anders had gone through every drawer in the vanity, picked through a series of foreign, silky-looking outfits in the wardrobe, and stuck his finger into each and every one of the creams and oils scattered across the white marble of the bathroom countertop.

As a result, when Fenris returned, Anders smelled like the back-end of an apothecary, and he was attempting to swipe off a streak of white powder that had somehow gotten onto his coat.

‘I’m not doing anything,’ Anders said immediately, whirling around when he heard the telltale creak of bare feet on polished floorboards. ‘I was just—you know. Looking for _ingredients_ that might be useful in a ritual, should we have to perform another one.’

And also, the mirror in the vanity indicated, trying something on, a combination of lotions, creamy white, streaked all over his throat to heal the raw and itchy skin. Whatever that metal was, Anders had discovered he was probably allergic to it.

Fenris made a show of rolling his eyes, but the odd display itself seemed to pass right over him. Indeed, he didn’t look well and truly _present_ in the moment. His gaze was unfocused, his posture despondent. Anders knew something was wrong, but he didn’t know what, and he didn’t know how to ask; the only thing he did know was that the gesture wouldn’t be appreciated. Years of antagonizing one another had left them in this position, where Anders might have been different, but he remembered enough to recognize there was no point in irrelevant overtures _this_ late in their relationship.

 _Relationship_. If it could even be called that. They’d settled into hating one another quite nicely, hadn’t they? There was a sensibility in that, a predictability, something they could both understand, the only thing they both agreed on. But whenever Anders reached for it, poking the spot where it was supposed to be like one always felt compelled to tongue at a sore gum or loose tooth, it simply wasn’t there. He knew what it was, the hole it had left, what went inside, but he couldn’t force himself to create that same feeling anymore. There was nothing to build it with. There was just _nothing_ , period.

It was all very well and good that he was able to think about it so deeply, but Fenris was still standing across the way like the statue of a man, as still as a cat on a fence or a windowsill, but without any tension for leaping. Slowly, Anders reached up to rub the creams more thoroughly into his neck, against the rough bristles of his stubble, which was getting wildly out of control. He swallowed, and felt that motion bob against his palm.

‘Find anything good?’ Anders asked at last, at a complete loss. Fenris could have at least noticed all the vials and little pots scattered over the vanity table, some of them left on the floor or dropped carelessly onto the bed, the open drawers, the pure chaos of the room. It had all been to keep himself busy, Anders knew that; moving frantically from item to item, so as to avoid giving himself the stillness necessary for actual thought. ‘I know _I_ did. You really should try this. It smells exotic.’

‘I found nothing,’ Fenris said, incapable of giving further detail, or even pretending, for Anders’s sake. Or even pretending for his own. He moved, rangy, toward the far wall, flicking at the gauzy curtain to peer out the window into the street below; Anders half expected the delicate fabric to tear on one of the talons of his gloves. But instead it slithered free over his hand, blowing with a slight, salty breeze toward Fenris’s face, billowing in toward the skin, then sucked back out through the open window with a shift of the wind. He didn’t even blink.

‘Well, I found creams and things,’ Anders said, dropping one tub back onto the vanity at his side. ‘I never expected you’d be the sort to be vain, Fenris, but perhaps it’s something to do with your skin—’

‘Those are Danarius’s,’ Fenris snapped. Once again, Anders supposed he deserved that reprimand, and accepted it willingly. ‘They are not _mine_.’

Anders braced himself against the vanity mirror. He could still smell all the unfamiliar scents rising off his skin, but beneath that, there was _always_ the metal. He needed a bath, some clean clothes, a griffon to show up at the window and carry him out of this place. _He needed Justice_ , who would find the right path, the _just_ path, one single way to carry forward when Anders himself was lost.

But he had only himself—and Fenris, who looked as lost as Anders felt.

‘You belong here more than I do.’ Anders knew even before he spoke that it was the wrong thing, and still, he said it anyway, because of sheer pettiness. At least—and this part was unusual—he regretted it immediately. ‘I mean— That isn’t—’

Fenris let his answer go unspoken, but Anders could practically hear it anyway, sharp as the spikes of armor on his shoulders. _I do not belong here, mage._ And he didn’t—he couldn’t possibly have been more out of place than if he were Anders himself, or Anders’s reflection, which, when Anders caught sight of it in the mirror, seemed equally unfortunate, no more and no less. Anders wondered if he’d really feel satisfied winning the prize of who was most miserable; it would be something, to be sure, but that something might have been nothing more than a backhanded victory.

‘This is Minrathous,’ Fenris said at last, stalking across the room, making his way to the cell door. It was hidden behind a painted screen, as though a pretty scene made it that much easier to forget the _person_ locked within. He shoved the whole thing aside, then gestured to the door itself, waiting for Anders to understand the implications of something that was neither a request nor a command. ‘It seems this place cannot operate without _some_ manner of slavery. But as… _Hawke_ said, I cannot bring you outside these walls without that collar.’ Fenris waited as Anders picked his way across the room, amongst the many personal effects scattered over the floor, a battleground littered with foreign objects. Then, he stood beside Fenris, just before the entrance, neither of them wanting to be the first one inside. ‘Cloth will serve you better than oils,’ Fenris added, voice bitter and deep, before squaring his shoulders and crossing the threshold. ‘Something between the metal and the skin.’

*

It only occurred to Anders after the collar was on, and shut tight over a few silk scarves, that Fenris knew his way around the object intimately—too intimately, perhaps. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, knowing what they knew—assuming what they’d come to assume about this place—but still, it rankled. Anders didn’t like to think of Fenris being in this position almost as much as he didn’t like _experiencing_ it for himself. He thought there might be something important about that admission, but it disappeared amidst the more pressing discomfort, not the metaphorical weight behind the collar, but it’s _physical_ realities.

‘Stop scratching,’ Fenris muttered, adjusting the sleeve on his fine silk shirt. _He_ was one to talk, although for once Fenris might have been just about as uncomfortable as Anders was.

But Bodahn had looked at him askance when he’d attempted to leave the house in what he always wore, that spiked armor Anders had never seen him without.

‘Let me pick out something more…appropriate for an evening at the Hawke Estate, messere,’ Bodahn had said, slowly and patiently, bowing and scraping in his own forceful way. ‘It won’t take but a moment. You stay right here.’

 _A moment_ ended up eating the remainder of their afternoon together, so that by the time the helpful dwarf was finished putting the finishing touches on Fenris’s outfit, it was well past time for them to leave.

Fenris looked like a stranger in his soft finery, throat exposed, leather vambraces over a cream-colored shirt and brown boots. _Real boots,_ and Fenris had put them on his feet as though it was something he did every day without question. The crowning piece was an elaborate vest of deep purples and greens, the kind of embroidery that made Anders’s hands ache and his eyes twitch just looking at it. Someone had probably gone _blind_ putting that thing together; they’d certainly worked their fingers to the bone sewing all the little details.

Fenris also looked about as comfortable in it as a cat in a lacy bodice, but he managed to shake off any noticeable distress before they left the house. A blade of mercy—the very gift he’d refused to take from Hawke all those years ago—was strapped between his shoulder-blades. Another remnant from his time as a gladiator, Anders imagined.

Anders glanced back over his shoulder to see the summer pavilion as it appeared from the street—a wide street, just past a wide garden, all part of the house and grounds. The architecture was exactly like Anders had always imagined, from books he wasn’t supposed to read but devoured anyway, when he’d been so much younger, and his flights of fancy more about escapism than forced stands and necessary violence.

‘Watch your _step,_ mage,’ came a voice, practically out of nowhere, startling Anders from his reverie. A templar clamped down on the chain running between Anders’s collar and Fenris’s wrist, nearly choking Anders in the process. He stumbled to catch himself, feeling the hard metal drag against his collarbone through the thin fabric of the scarves.

There was a templar in front of him, steel wings on his helmet and a cruel slit where his eyes ought to have been, and Anders was utterly alone, without the comforting fire of Justice’s indignation at his back. In Justice’s place was only the void where certainty had once been, and Anders could feel it all collapsing in on itself in the face of a threat. His neck was sweating. The silk was ruined. His mouth was dry.

‘Hang on a minute,’ the templar said. ‘Aren’t you…?’

 _Certainly not,_ Anders tried to say, but the words stuck in his throat.

‘Is there a problem?’ Fenris asked, swinging around as though his true calling was impeccable timing and not in fact, shoving his hand through the hearts of wayward slavers. ‘If you recognize my slave, then I’m sure you recognize _me_ , as well.’

Gone was the demeanor of hopelessness, the careful hesitation Fenris had displayed while buttoning his sleeves and smoothing down the fine fabric of his vest. He was a warrior once more in his element, always most at home when he could throw a challenge across a blood-drenched battlefield.

Anders was hoping it wouldn’t come to _blood-drenched battlefield_ in the streets of Minrathous, but one could never be certain. Especially not in Tevinter.

‘You’re…’ the templar began, then quickly released Anders’s chain. ‘Begging your pardon, Lord Fenris. I didn’t think—’

‘That much is evident,’ Fenris said, allowing his lip to curl in a snarl. ‘I was on my way to a dinner, templar. This interlude might cause me to be _late_ —not to mention I’m losing my appetite just looking at you. When I want help berating my slaves, I shall _ask_ for it, do you hear me? Your criticism was unasked for—and your interference unnecessary.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ the templar said. He attempted a bow, though his plate armor was so top-heavy that it looked as though he’d fall right over on the cobblestones. ‘My apologies, again.’

Fenris lifted his chin, drawing himself up to his full height. Considering he was an elf, it was still rather impressive. The Blade of Mercy had something to do with that effect. Anders suspected it would make anyone look taller. ‘Get out of my sight. And do not presume to meddle in my affairs again.’

The templar took off at a rapid speed that was only a few bare paces away from an outright jog. Anders watched him go, feeling relief fill him like cool water in an empty metal jug.

 _Empty_ being the operative word. And metal, too. The chains clanked ominously in Fenris’s hand, looped more tightly now around his wrist.

‘You’re better at this than I thought you’d be,’ Anders said. What he really meant was _thank you,_ but again the words stuck in his throat, somewhere between the emptiness and the metal. With all the sweat, some of the silk was bunching while some of it was slipping, and one of the sharp hinges was digging into the life-vein at Anders’s throat, making it difficult to think, but also giving him a fine excuse for being such a bastard.

‘A thought which disturbs me—’ Fenris began.

Anders recognized the way of it. ‘—more than I know,’ he concluded softly, remembering. He wondered if the templar was still watching, if he’d gone to fetch his friends, if they’d return in spades with rotten fruit. That would explain some of the stains on his clothes, at least. Anders could feel cool evening air across his bare skin, through the tears and the frayed fabric, one of the buckles of his belt was loose, dangling upon little more than a thread. His hands were free; no chains bound them together behind his back, yet the knowledge of the collar around his throat made it feel as though he couldn’t do all those comforting, pointless things, like smooth his hair back from his face or fuss with the hem of his sleeve. Every extra movement hurt from the how heavy the damn thing was at his throat, on his shoulders, bearing down into the bone.

Bone, which was unforgiving, but not _quite_ so solid as qunari-forged steel.

But it really wasn’t any of that that bothered him so. It was the nakedness of being without his magic—of being without _everything_ , a cold, hard ball of steel where something liquid and transformative and ever-changing should have been. His fingers spasmed, one hand clenching into a fist, and he stepped around a broken stone, the chains loud enough to ground him.

All around them, paper lanterns had been lit against the coming dark, pulsing warm and red and fluttering in the breeze. The street itself was a bit torn up in spots, but not overly crowded; they appeared to be in some district of wealthy villas, _summer pavilions_ all around, lush gardens and low walls and all the easy markers of Tevinter architecture, columns aplenty, glittering domes galore. Anders couldn’t help but notice he was the only _collared_ slave in the entire street. What few pedestrians there were had decided to give them a wide berth, and for once, it wasn’t because of Fenris’s intimidating armor, or even his intimidating sword.

‘We should move on,’ Fenris said. Another familiar line; Anders had heard it countless times before, and thought it fidgety and impatient, not keenly practical, as it was now.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, soft enough that any other passersby wouldn’t hear him. The audacity of a slave, conversing with his owner. Even Fenris, having mastered through study and also hatred how to _be_ a master, wouldn’t have been able to explain that one. ‘Enough parading me in the streets, I think. At least for now.’

*

Through a clever system of letting Bodahn talk however long he wished to—Fenris’s primary method of divining information—the dwarf had given away just enough about that evening that Fenris seemed satisfied. ‘I know the way,’ was all he’d said, and there was little more Anders could do but trust him.

When they found themselves in the doorway of another villa, lights on in the second floor windows, the rusty tinkle of a woman’s familiar laughter floating down from above, Anders knew they were in the right place, because only one person giggled quite like that, with the same gusto and abandon.

 _Isabela._

Moments later, the door to the atrium was thrown open; Anders prepared himself for the dog to come bounding down the stairs and launch itself at them, slobber everywhere, hot breath and dirty paws. But there was only Hawke—Hawke, and not a slave _or_ a servant, Anders noted, despite his rather carefree assertions on the matter before—holding one hand out, a dark glass bottle in the other.

‘And here I thought you’d forgotten. …Again. I was just about to send someone,’ Hawke said, with a cursory look—he did seem surprised—reserved for Anders, before he returned to the proper way of things, and ignored him completely. ‘But here you are. …Without the Agreggio. Ah well. Good thing I had some brought in just in case, isn’t it?’

There was a pause, in which Anders realized both he and Fenris were equally baffled about how to proceed. All of Fenris’s self-assurance from before had apparently vanished; Anders didn’t have to wonder where his own had gone, because he’d simply never had it to begin with.

Perhaps it was something to do with the familiarity of it all. If they closed their eyes, they could feel the warmth of the candlelight on their face and pretend they were standing in the foyer of the Hawke estate, passing into the open room, a warm fire crackling in the hearth to greet them. An old habit, and one they might someday be able to think back on fondly.

Once their lives stopped being blown to the Void and back.

But Fenris hadn’t closed his eyes. He hadn’t even blinked, observing Hawke with the hard, unflinching focus he reserved for all enemies and all friends equally. And, it seemed, Hawke had actually been expecting that.

‘Interesting outfit,’ Hawke added, ushering them in. Or rather, ushering Fenris in, while Anders followed behind as a sort of walking accessory. ‘So you finally let Bodahn pick something out for you, I take it?’

Fenris cleared his throat. ‘He’s getting on in years,’ he said, by means of explanation. Only Anders knew it for what it was, someone else’s line repeated, as Fenris was so fond of doing.

Hawke shook his head, broad shoulders lifting in a shrug. Anders was half-expecting him to be wearing that wine red robe set, the one with the gold edging, the one that was so familiar, but instead he was dressed like Fenris—cotton shirt and maroon vest open over his chest, revealing dark hair and pale scars. ‘You certainly have your own way of doing things, I’ll give you that. But I know better than to try and talk _you_ out of anything. Can I get you a drink? Footstool? Closet to stuff that glowering fellow in until you need him?’

‘No,’ Fenris said, almost too quickly—as though he’d heard Anders’s heartbeat pick up at the mere thought of being locked in a closet. But, Anders told himself, it had nothing to do with heartbeats. Fenris was merely thinking strategically—that it wouldn’t do them any good to be separated in such unfamiliar surroundings. And possibly that being locked in a closet would be awful for anyone, but especially for someone who’d spent an entire year in solitary. ‘I mean…yes. To the drink.’

Anders felt a rush of longing and envy. The knowledge that he could drink now, and get drunk, was an incredibly tempting one, the only unarguably _good_ thing to come of all this, possibly the best and only way to solve his problems. Especially in this place—he had a feeling that driving himself to complete inebriation might in fact solve _everything_. Not to mention that he couldn’t help regarding each new door they passed as a fresh threat—as though there were slaves locked behind every one, packed up to the rafters in the dark.

If that was Hawke’s idea of a joke, then it was decidedly _un_ funny. At least the Hawke Anders knew always had the good grace to be decent about his terrible sense of humor.

‘ _That’s_ more like it,’ Hawke said, flashing his teeth in a way that might have been intended to be friendly. To Anders, it looked predatory, more like a wolf baring its fangs than the affable mabari hound Anders and Fenris were both used to dealing with. ‘I’ve never known you to turn down good wine. Or terrible wine, for that matter. That night after we won our freedom—I don’t even think that _was_ wine. They probably used rat’s blood for coloring. And rat’s _other things,_ besides. I’ll never go to that establishment again.’

‘That is…what you said the last time,’ Fenris said, treading as carefully with his words as he did with his steps. Looking down—what seemed like the safest direction for a slave _to_ look—Anders saw that what he’d assumed were normal boots actually had no soles; every now and then he glimpsed a flash of bare heel against the handsome slate stones of Hawke’s walkway.

 _Elves._ You could take the slave out of Tevinter, but you couldn’t put him in shoes.

Fortunately, Hawke didn’t seem to notice the uncertainty in Fenris’s voice. Either he was used to it—which seemed likely—or he wasn’t _really_ listening, which seemed even more likely.

‘The others are in the dining room,’ Hawke carried on breezily. ‘ _Waiting_ , I’ll point out, but good company’s always worth it. Isabela was halfway to climbing up on the table and putting on a show, but you know how she gets. She does that even when you _aren’t_ late. I sometimes wonder how Varric manages to hold onto her. But then I remember: _he’s Varric._ ’ Hawke turned, holding the door at the end of the corridor open for Fenris. ‘You’re _sure_ you don’t want me to stick him somewhere?’ he added, with another glance in Anders’s direction. Either it was something Fenris normally agreed to, or Hawke was still unsettled by the sight of a mage free and unfettered in Fenris’s mansion earlier that day.

Anders somehow fought the urge to wiggle his fingers in a threatening manner, just to see what Hawke would do. It was terrifying, being the _only_ one in charge of his own actions, but if Anders didn’t practice learning restraint now, he was afraid he’d never quite get the hang of it. He kept his head bent and his eyes down. From that vantage point, he’d been able to see Fenris’s fingers twitch at the mention of Isabela and Varric; he’d also noted that his own boots had holes in them. No wonder his toes felt so breezy.

After everything they’d been through, Anders was no longer sure what to expect. He didn’t dare allow himself to feel too hopeful, but at the same time—surely _Varric_ , if anyone, would know _something_.

Hawke led them both inside, paying less attention to Anders than he would to an ill-favored pet. If Fenris looked over his shoulder, attempting to make eye contact so they could work out some sort of plan, Anders didn’t see it. They weren’t the sort who were so in tune with one another that they could communicate wordlessly, after all, and Anders had never been good with off-the-cuff planning. That was one thing he and Justice had shared, a common weakness that would have led them to ruin at least a half-dozen times—if it hadn’t been for Hawke.

Except Hawke was currently leading Fenris to his seat, through a sea of slaves bearing food and wine.

Of everything that had happened to Anders—and his was a rich life that included broodmother breeding pits _and_ the notorious Oghren—this was probably the strangest to date. He almost couldn’t wait to meet Isabela, just to see if she was a matronly Rivaini with a frock up to her chin and good, sensible shoes.

He’d probably die of shock then and there on Hawke’s fine floors, and have to be carried out by the slaves like the remains of supper, buried somewhere beneath a monument. _Here lies Anders, good and dead_ , and travelers would spit on the stone in passing.

*

Fortunately for Anders’s continued good health, Isabela was no more a matron in Tevinter than she had been in Kirkwall. That was a relief. He could see her directly over the back of Fenris’s head, in a one-shouldered dress the color of new wine, fastened in place by a few gold clasps, the fabric clinging to her body like a devoted lover whenever she shifted on her couch. She’d brightened like a Dalish lantern when Fenris had walked into the room, and occasionally looked at him now in a way that made Anders think there was something going on below the table.

Beside her, chest as bare as ever and just as glossy, Varric was reclining on a couch of his own, eating from a bowl of olives settled neatly on his lap. Every now and then Isabela leaned over, and nibbled one from his outstretched fingers.

Anders knew he was staring, that slaves weren’t supposed to stare, but he could no more return his gaze to Fenris’s feet than he could put everything about this place to right again.

Isabela and Varric.

 _Isabela and Varric._

It made a ludicrous amount of sense, sort of perfect in a roundabout way. They looked good together, despite Isabela’s wandering eyes, and also happy.

Anders hoped they didn’t have children. He wasn’t ready to become an uncle.

‘Oh, you _brought_ him,’ Isabela said, pausing to wipe the corner of her mouth with an arched forefinger. ‘I was _hoping_ you would. I’ve always wanted to meet him—why _have_ you been so stingy, Fenris? Were you waiting for me to beg, is that it?’

‘You know, I told her not to believe everything she hears,’ Varric added, sucking olive oil off his thumb. ‘But, what can I say? A man’s reputation is _sometimes_ as enjoyable as the truth.’

‘Sometimes more,’ Isabela agreed, with a sly look his way.

Varric grinned back at her. ‘And sometimes, it doesn’t do him _justice_ at all.’

Anders cringed. He knew it was probably what they wanted—but they couldn’t possibly have understood just how much it would hurt him. He was supposed to _feel_ something when that word was spoken, a sense of completion and of purpose, a future _and_ a past. Instead, it was nothing more than a concept, no more related to him than anyone at this table, no longer in his very blood.

The worst part, Anders thought, was remembering all too clearly that Isabela and Varric were the kindest to him of everyone back home—patient, in their own impatient ways; Varric had taken his pillow, and Isabela was the first to talk to him after everything, in the back of the Hanged Man, after the…incident with the chantry. Anders still remembered the way she smiled at him, gold lip stud glinting in the light from the blast, and shook her head, just the right combination of belief and acceptance.

Now, they were strangers, two people who wanted him trussed up and trotted out for their amusement. Varric would turn it into a marvelous story, and Isabela would, too, just not one she wrote down—although she might share it with people, tavern tales of what one could do to a broken man to make him feel whole again.

Anders felt the corner of his mouth twitch, neither a smile nor a frown, and tried to bow his head to hide it. But the top edge of the collar dug into his chin, hard, just underneath a patch of particularly rough stubble, where the skin was most vulnerable, and he couldn’t keep that expression from being put on display for everyone to try their hand at interpreting.

‘Fenris, is he…smiling?’ Isabela stood with a swish of gauzy fabric, body swaying as she approached them. At least she still walked the same way, completely certain of all the space her body filled, a self-understanding that Anders was suddenly dizzyingly jealous of. She hesitated, her hand lifted to his face, but unable to bring herself to touch him—yet, Anders guessed; it was always a matter of _yet_ with Isabela, or rather, a matter of timing and suspense—then placed two cool fingers under his jaw, tilting his chin up. ‘ _Ohhh._ Yes of course; I see it now,’ she murmured, almost delighted, like a refugee child who’d just found a discarded Hightown toy. ‘He’s mad, isn’t he? I suppose I don’t _entirely_ blame him.’

‘A thousand pardons,’ Varric said, still grinning. He was watching them closely—with an expression of scrutiny that made Anders twice as nervous as the smell of Isabela’s sweet perfume—but he made no move to get up, or to inspect Anders any closer. ‘You know how Isabela is. Why look when you can touch?’

‘He knows me so well,’ Isabela said, giggling.

Fenris held tightly to the chain, his eyes fixed on the far wall; Anders was relatively certain he _wasn’t_ studying the mosaic there, lit dusky by the squat floor lamps, and instead saw only something else, something that wasn’t even in the room with them. ‘Permission…has been granted,’ he said, realizing a beat too late that it was his turn to speak.

Isabela giggled again, running her fingers along the collar, pulling back with a gasp of delight when she nearly pinched her skin on one of the metal loops, then returning to her tactile exploration with renewed vigor. ‘ _Dangerous_ ,’ she said. ‘I absolutely _love_ it. Varric, you don’t suppose _we_ might be able to get one of these? Pull a few strings with your guild friends, see if we can’t, I don’t know, put it to use somehow?’

‘Anything for you, pet,’ Varric promised.

Fenris coughed. Anders did his best not to think about it. Isabela’s perfume was overwhelming, and all wrong—it obscured the scent of the sea, the salt and the sand and the sunlight. She was wearing an entire thaig’s worth of jewelry, but none of it was the same, glittering stones set into the gold, too many bangles around her wrists. One of them clinked against the top of the chain, a clear, tinkling sound that cut through the air. Anders realized he hadn’t blinked in a very long time. His eyes were starting to hurt with how dry they were.

‘Varric, please,’ Hawke said. ‘Not before we’ve eaten. You know how sensitive Fenris’s stomach can be.’

‘One day, Hawke, you’re gonna find someone,’ Varric began. It sounded like the beginning of an age old conversation, one these people had indulged in countless times. Never before had Anders felt more like an intruder—unfamiliar banter in place of the time-worn jokes he knew so well, the ones he’d grown weary of, the ones he thought of as home.

‘This way,’ Fenris muttered, refusing to tug on the chain. ‘You sit at my left side, not my right.’

‘I get to _sit?_ ’ Anders asked, remembering at the very last minute to speak under his breath. It wasn’t as good as keeping entirely silent, but it was better than nothing—nothing, which was the only alternative.

Nothing, which was everything now.

Fenris made a noise in the back of his throat—a wordless rebuke, or perhaps confirmation. Not for the first time, Anders wished they were in a play, so that they might enjoy the privilege of speaking to one another in plain sight without being heard. All this _grunting_ and meaningful words spoken to other parties was going to get very tedious very fast.

Anders rubbed his palms against his thighs to keep from fussing with the collar, then trotted after Fenris dutifully. He was beginning to recognize the uncomfortable sensation of _gratitude_ that warmed him all the way down like a glass of expensive champagne—and he wasn’t at all certain that he liked it. Still, he could comfort himself with the knowledge that Fenris wasn’t doing any of it—the scarves beneath the collar, his care with the chain, that intervention with the templar—out of any personal concern for _Anders._ It was to salve his own twisted memories, an attempt to right some of the wrongs perpetrated against _him_ during those long years he’d been enslaved to the magisters.

Put in those terms, it all seemed very self-centered, which was a motivation Anders could understand and respect. From the way Fenris held his wrist—subtly awkward, like a newly-belled cat—it was obvious that being on the other end of the leash chafed him just as much as wearing a collar chafed Anders, _and_ his neck.

Fenris sat on one of the low, soft couches, forcing Anders to do an awkward shimmy where he _almost_ plopped down next to him, then caught himself, stood back up, and finally spun around to fall into a sort of half-crouch, half-kneel at Fenris’s left side.

Isabela clapped her hands with pleasure, bracelets jingling prettily against her bare arms. ‘Ooh, _Fenris._ I can’t believe you’ve been hiding him from us all this time. He’s _funny._ You know how I like them funny.’

‘Now, Isabela,’ Varric told her, with an indulgent smile. ‘You know what I always say about helping yourself to another man’s property.’

‘Don’t do it until his back’s turned?’ Isabela said, flashing her white teeth.

‘That’s my woman,’ Varric said, grinning right back.

‘Eugh.’ Hawke sighed, dropping himself down into the seat nearest Fenris. Although there were slaves milling about, filling the table with all manner of aromatic delights and filling the pitchers with dark Imperium wine, Anders couldn’t help but notice there was no one sitting at _Hawke’s_ left side in a collar. ‘My apologies, Fenris. If I’d known they were going to act like this, I’d have uninvited them, and we could’ve had a quiet meal just the two of us.’

‘No surprises here, Hawke,’ Varric said, flagging down a slave bearing what looked like an entire waterfowl, far larger than Free Marches poultry, plucked clean, then roasted. ‘We’re _always_ like this. You’re gonna have to use something else as an excuse, if you want a moment alone with Broody over there. But the conversation would be _just terrible_. I figure it’s only fair to warn you in advance.’

Hawke let out an obliging laugh, while next to him Fenris drew in a deep breath, using the moment’s shift in attention to try and make himself more comfortable. Out of the corner of his eye, Anders saw him winding his bare fingers in the thick links of the chain, as though trying to create new gauntlets for himself.

It was debatable who was more uncomfortable in their situation, although Anders was willing to cast a lot for the man kneeling on the marble floor, otherwise known as _himself._

The slaves made the rounds with sumptuous fruit plates and assorted pastries stuffed with dates, sweet cheeses and nuts; there was also the roast Varric had deigned to nibble at, as well as a fragrant stew of cubed meat and leafy greens, something that resembled an herbed rack of lamb, and an entire tray that seemed to bear, oddly enough, both fresh and roasted vegetables mixed together.

Anders had never seen such a wealth of flavors gathered in one place, not even at the banquets for the nobles they’d been forced to hold at Vigil’s Keep. Even Hawke, in the height of his glory days at the estate, giddy with his newfound influence and his newfound riches, had never gone to _this_ much trouble to show off. But Anders liked grand gestures; this one smelled utterly delectable. Despite his intent to keep his eyes on the floor, he found himself staring after the trays with an unmistakable desire in his heart, or more accurately, in his stomach. His mouth watered, and he swallowed quickly to prevent himself from turning into the mabari hounds he’d always held such disdain for: a drooling beast on the end of a leash.

There was _no_ excuse for ropey drool. No matter who someone was, and _especially_ when they had two legs instead of four.

Anders was reminded of that deep, abiding, _Grey Warden_ hunger, more like a wasting disease than a mere symptom of heroics. One always had to pay a price for greatness. This was merely one of the Anders’s outstanding debts, one he’d always be indentured to; the ritual had removed the element of Justice, but of course it hadn’t touched the darkspawn taint. The collar, too, was designed for quelling a different sort of magic, magic that was innate, rather than an acquired element. Anders licked his lips, staring at the plate of food, unable to recall the last time he’d even _had_ something to eat.

With Justice, it hadn’t been as difficult to forego the necessary meals. Justice filled that hunger, too, or at least eclipsed it; only sometimes had Anders woken in the night, stomach growling, on the cusp of feeling like himself, that person who was an old acquaintance, but so long gone he could no longer be considered a true friend. Now, he was back, unexpectedly knocking on the door, assuming everything would be the same as it was the last time they’d met, nearly ten years ago.

But it wasn’t the same. It couldn’t be. One of them had changed, and one of them hadn’t, and Anders was too hungry, too stiff-muscled, to wrestle with the concepts in order to unravel the puzzle, piece by tangled piece.

As always, he was stupidly relieved to have so much else crowding out his finer thinking. He watched as Hawke poured Fenris a glass of wine, then as Fenris ignored the food before him to drink, without bothering to contemplate the vintage first.

Hawke watched him.

Anders took note of it only because he had to look somewhere other than the roast, or else his stomach would start making noises. When Hawke caught him staring, something flashed in his eyes; he dared Anders to say something, knowing full well he couldn’t, then held his gaze for a few more pointed moments, before looking away.

‘More wine?’ a slave began, coming up silently on Fenris’s right side. So that was why Anders had to sit on his left. But Hawke leaned forward, covering Fenris’s glass, shaking his head.

‘I’ll serve him,’ he said. ‘Thank you. That’s all.’

It was another little detail Anders was too perplexed, too starving, to contemplate, but Fenris almost seemed grateful for it, if stiff and silent about everything. As usual. Anders shifted in place, trying to get more comfortable; he succeeded only in making the chain clank loudly over the sound of dishes being scraped across the table, of Varric licking his fingers and exclaiming, joyfully, about the meal, while Isabela placed a tiny egg between her breasts, for Varric to eat off her skin.

‘I really didn’t invite them,’ Hawke said casually, reclining on one wrist, the muscles of his arm hard and thick beneath the loose cotton of his sleeve. ‘You know how it is. They heard there’d be free food and suddenly they were here, just dropping by, impeccable timing—as always.’

‘And it’s a good thing we _did_ show up,’ Isabela agreed. Varric’s head was buried in her chest. Anders wondered why some people had all the luck, while others had none of it.

‘No offense taken to your harsh commentary, Hawke,’ Varric added, surfacing for air at last.

Hawke generously chose to ignore them. ‘How’s the wine, Fenris?’

Fenris paused, the fingers of his free hand tight around the goblet stem. Anders unwittingly licked his lips, caught himself at it, and wished to disappear through the floor. Not for the first time that evening, and probably not for the last.

‘You said it yourself,’ Fenris told him at length. ‘I never turn down wine.’

‘So it’s that terrible?’ Hawke laughed. ‘Fine. _Don’t_ bother with sparing my feelings.’

Anders fingertips itched; his head spun; his stomach let out a quiet gurgle of need loud enough that only he could hear it. The muscles in his calves were cramping and his knees had lost all feeling, to say nothing of the agony in his shoulders, the distinct, claustrophobic impression he got, with every passing, silent second, that the collar was actually _tightening_ around his throat. Not being a part of the conversation was unbearable, not to mention how much _lonelier_ it made him feel—as though there might as well be no one left in the world, or as though he himself was no one.

He couldn’t breathe.

But Fenris wasn’t looking his way, and there was no means of signaling all this to him, nothing but the air running suddenly ragged up from his chest. He didn’t know why he’d come—and then he remembered why, because otherwise he really _would_ have been alone. And that was supposed to be worse, somehow, than all this: the sweat dripping down over his shoulders and his collarbone, pooling in the dip between clavicles, everything stinking of metal and the flowers in Isabela’s hair.

‘Drink,’ Fenris said suddenly, and a goblet of water appeared in front of Anders’s face. He gripped it with both hands, wincing when their fingers touched and Fenris recoiled. Then, he pretended he was a happy, spoiled little pet, doing his best to choke the liquid down.

It soothed him, even if it was nearly impossible to swallow.

‘So you feed him, too?’ Isabela asked, gleeful, her old, wicked self—only in this incarnation, it wasn’t quite so charming. ‘Don’t tell me you let him eat off your body? At this rate, I’ll have to start calling _Varric_ my naughty little mage.’

Now it was Varric’s turn to make a noise of displeasure. ‘Please, _Isabela_ , my glorious sea-bird, you know how I feel about insults to my fine dwarven heritage.’

‘But I was just about to compliment your fine dwarven _wares_ ,’ Isabela purred.

Fenris flicked his fingers toward his untouched food. ‘Eat,’ he said. When everyone turned to stare at him, Anders caught sight of him spotting the far wall once more. Another coping mechanism; Anders wondered how he hadn’t noticed it before. ‘It pleases me,’ Fenris added, an enigmatic explanation.

Anders wanted to help him, but there was no distraction he could provide, no service he could perform—except to be himself, he supposed; and that would have to be enough. He reached for the roast, and tried to remember what it was like to enjoy attention, positive or otherwise.

It was easier than he’d thought it would be.

It occurred to Anders, halfway into a roast leg of something with the grease threatening to drip down his chin, that he’d never _actually_ seen Fenris eat anything. He didn’t actually know what it was elves fed on, whether they preferred only fruits and vegetable or whether they butchered the occasional halla when no one was looking. Perhaps they were like trees, and needed only to drink in their daily sunlight, nutrients passing through the dirt into the soles of their feet.

Perhaps _that_ was why they never wore shoes. Or perhaps Anders was merely delirious with hunger.

Whatever the case really was, Fenris never once glanced back toward his rapidly vanishing plate of food, and he refused all Hawke’s attempts to acquire him a second one. He did accept a second glass of wine, however, and a third when the bottle lingered hopefully near him.

As the night wore on, Isabela’s laugh grew louder and more sweet, while Varric grew redder in the face. The combination of rich food and rich liquor could do that to a person, Anders supposed, although Hawke seemed to be affected by neither. He ate sensibly, in moderate portions, and seemed to spend the majority of his night trying to coax Fenris into _something_ —a leg of lamb, a decent conversation, to put the glass down and expostulate on their so-called _glory days_ in the stadium.

Anders listened with both ears, although the bulk of his attention remained on the unexpected meal in front of him. He’d been a slave for only a day, but already he’d managed to cultivate the mindset that at any moment, whatever small things he could still call _good_ might be snatched away from him. It wasn’t an old habit, actually, older than Justice.

Things had always been that way in the Fereldan Circle.

Being a mage wasn’t so different from being a slave. Why anyone had felt the need to go the extra step and make them one and the same _here_ was beyond him.

*

The rest of dinner passed in a blur of naughty jokes and tantalizing glimpses of Isabela’s legs as she draped herself affectionately against Varric on the couch. Hawke told a ribald tale about defeating a fellow gladiator with only a silver fork and his mother’s old wedding veil, one so compelling that Varric roused himself from an Isabela-induced stupor to applaud appreciatively.

‘That one’s getting filed away for later, Hawke,’ Varric said, adjusting the crimson-and-gold fall of his shirt. ‘Just in case I ever want to give up this crazy life and become a storyteller.’

‘You _wouldn’t,_ ’ Isabela said, full lips pursed in horror. ‘Do you have any idea how _poor_ writers are?’

‘Good thing you married me for love then, isn’t it?’ Varric asked with a leer.

‘Keep that up and I might just agree to your next real proposal,’ Isabela replied, reaching over and twining her fingers in his chest hair, and it was _all too much_ for Anders, who promptly had to look away—for reasons of not wanting to waste the good food he’d just bolted down.

He was fond of his friends, but these people were _not_ them, and that served to make the entire experience rather sickening. It felt like watching blood magic at work, although Anders had long since ruled _that_ out as a possibility. For example, there was nothing here approximating the atmospheric pall that had hung heavy in the air in the days before Uldred’s assault on the Circle. Anders had never forgotten—would likely never forget—what it was like to be confronted with that sort of true evil, and this, eerie as it was, was _not_ it.

‘Goodness, just _look_ at the time, poppet,’ Isabela exclaimed, managing to pry herself away from Varric at last. ‘We’d better get going if we want to make our engagement for… _dessert.’_

Fenris cleared his throat; Anders turned his way just in time to catch him rolling his eyes. Just past Fenris’s shoulder, Anders saw Hawke watching them again—because he’d been watching _Fenris_ —and Anders looked quickly in the other direction, a chaos of gazes and looks and focus and everyone trying not to meet one another’s eyes.

For all his attempts, Ander wasn’t putting on a particularly compelling performance as a slave.

Probably because if he tried to do it accurately, really get into the mindset, he’d end up consumed with misery over the thought of another Anders in this very position— _without_ the knowledge that there was some other world out there waiting for him, some other world where he belonged.

That _this_ , without hope and without reprieve, _was it_.

Although that Anders did have Justice. At least he’d never truly be alone.

‘Yes, get out of my house, there’s an idea,’ Hawke said, charming smile in place as he rose. ‘Thank you once again, delightful freeloaders, for ambushing yet another dinner party, and doing your weather best to ruin it.’

‘It’s not a party without us,’ Varric pointed out.

Privately, in the part of him that hadn’t been blown apart by panic, Anders rather agreed.

‘Yes,’ Fenris said, and it took Anders a moment to realize that he wasn’t agreeing with _him,_ but rather with what Hawke had said. ‘We— _I_ should be on my way, as well.’

‘Are you sure?’ Hawke asked, making no attempt to hide the difference in his reaction to Fenris’s announcement, his genuine disappointment replacing that gentle mockery of it. ‘It isn’t that late.’

‘The streets of Minrathous aren’t safe to travel at night,’ Fenris said, downing the dregs of his wine. If the alcohol was having any effect on him at all, it was simply that his words came out more easily. ‘Besides, I’m an early riser.’

Whatever Hawke’s excuses were died on his lips; Anders actually saw them wither away. Hawke clamped his mouth shut after that, and crossed his arms over his vast expanse of chest, before lifting one hand to rub his fingers through his hair, accepting Fenris’s peccadilloes for what they were: unshakeable truth.

With all his experience in the ring, Anders thought, there seemed to be one thing that still confounded him, one opponent he couldn’t best.

Varric slid past him, and Isabela too. Anders caught sight of Isabela’s parting gift, a hand running along the small of Hawke’s back and down a good bit lower than that; he also caught _Varric’s_ hand, reaching up to take hers, and Hawke’s blanching expression as _both_ sets of fingers touched him on the inside of his thigh. Then, the two lovebirds were blessedly gone, and Anders felt like he could breathe again, or at the very least reach for a napkin, trying to clean sauce off the collar.

‘Fenris—’ Hawke began, a door falling shut somewhere beneath them, and Isabela and Varric’s laughter chasing the darkness through the atrium, out into the street.

Anders dropped his napkin when Fenris stood, and did his best not to scuttle after him. It didn’t work, due to the stooping, awkward lope he had to affect, thanks to the burden of all that bloody metal.

‘The wine was acceptable,’ Fenris said, nicer now because of it. But there was also something tight in his jaw, tighter than usual, a glance spared for the window, and the night sky beyond it.

Anders would have thought the cover of night would be a _good_ thing, something to prevent anyone else from recognizing him in the faint glow from the street-lanterns. Then again, it was more than likely Fenris knew something about Minrathous at night that Anders didn’t—or perhaps it had nothing to do with any real danger, and was more about an imagined threat, one from the past that crept like a specter along the quiet streets, slinking through the gutters and rustling the bushes.

‘Is something bothering you?’ Hawke asked, refusing to be silenced now that they were alone. Or alone with Anders, which was practically the same thing. ‘Normally I can appreciate how eccentric you are, and how little _you_ appreciate anyone’s generosity, but I can’t help noticing—’

‘The wine was better than acceptable,’ Fenris said, skillfully avoiding the issue as no doubt _any_ Fenris would have done. Anders still couldn’t help feeling just a bit disappointed, as though he’d been about to watch some private scene, and at least _one_ of this place’s secrets would have been revealed to him through it. Even if it didn’t matter. Even if it was, ultimately, completely irrelevant. At least it would have been _something_. ‘I’ll see myself out,’ Fenris added, not with the faint color of regret—but still, there was something understanding, or apologetic, or at least morose about his posture as he left Hawke behind: standing with his arms crossed to wonder what he could have done differently, now that he really _was_ alone.

Anders was no expert. He probably shouldn’t have tried to tell.

*

Danarius’s summer pavilion was dark and quiet by contrast when they returned, thankfully without incident, letting themselves in through the atrium, a very different experience in the moonlight. Fenris paused before the doorway as he did before every doorway in the villa itself, as though the act of passing from one room to the next would also take him backward through time.

Then, as swiftly as it came, the hesitation was gone, and they made their way through the empty halls and up the empty stairs without even Bodahn to usher them along.

When they came to the master bedroom— _master_ , literally; Anders was going to have to remember that one—it was Anders’s turn to hesitate.

‘I’m not going back in there,’ he said, remembering too late to whisper.

Fenris _tsked_ , deep in his throat, and dropped the chain. Anders had to scramble to catch it, then felt like a fool, leading _himself_ within. The door swung shut behind him with an air of finality to it; Anders thought perhaps he did understand Fenris’s superstitious behavior around doorways a little more now.

‘We are alone,’ Fenris said. ‘You may remove that… _thing_.’

Anders didn’t need to be told twice, and he found the key—he’d decided to keep it; Fenris hadn’t decided to disagree that was for the best—tucked away inside an inner pocket, the only one on his coat that wasn’t rent with holes. His hands trembled as he undid the first of three locks, then finally managed to heave the thing off him, groaning as he released it, all too willingly, like a burning thing set upon the floor.

It sat there, staring up at both of them, the black design like a lone eye branded on the metal, while they stared back at it for longer than they should have. Removed, empty, not around anyone’s neck but encircling nothing more than air—it should have lost its meaning, no power in the splayed hinges or the polished chain. But it hadn’t, and they both knew it, taking care to step around it in order to try to leave it all behind.

‘Well,’ Anders said, stumbling over one of the cream-pots he’d left out of place earlier, hearing it skitter across the floor and thud against the far wall. ‘I’ll just— How about a light?’

‘No,’ Fenris said, just as a little spark flickered to life on Anders’s palm. Fenris pulsed white-hot, immediately glowing, while Anders breathed a sigh of relief—the darkness banished doubly now, and magic itself, a lyrium song, rushing to fill the emptiness it left behind.

‘It’s just a _little_ flame. Easier than calling Bodahn, too, I expect.’ Anders knelt to set it against the oil in the nearest lamp; Fenris didn’t relax even when he straightened, the magic already faded. ‘I don’t like the dark,’ Anders told him simply, turning away before either of them had a chance to acknowledge, or respond to, the implications of such a statement. Who had said it; who he’d said it _to_.

‘Pfaugh,’ Fenris said, the sound—not _quite_ a word—lingering in the back of his throat. He turned away, lyrium tattoos dimming in place of the flickering candlelight. Anders couldn’t help but watch him, drawn to the familiar blue light, remembering all too keenly what it had been like to glow with purpose, once.

Now Anders couldn’t even chase the dark away on his own.

He turned away rather than allow his gaze to become a stare, and none too soon, either, as the slither of fabric and clink of unbuckling metal told him that Fenris was undressing.

It must be _quite nice,_ Anders reflected, with no small amount of bitterness, to know that one had an entire wardrobe of outfits to change into at a moment’s notice. Anders had great affection for his own clothes, the feathered coat and his very first pair of trousers, but no man liked to go about looking stained and dirty. Not to mention how awful it would be to pop a trouser seam in the streets.

Anders adjusted the lamp he’d lit, studiously ignoring the painted screen that hid his _slave’s quarters_ within. He’d already made his needs quite clear, and if Fenris hadn’t outright agreed to them, he hadn’t raised his voice in protest, either. With Fenris, that was as good as a rousing endorsement.

‘You may take _this_ bed, if it suits you better,’ Fenris said, from somewhere over Anders’s shoulder. When he turned, Fenris was clad once again in his dark, spiked armor, flexing his left hand as he tugged on his gauntlet. As far as pajamas went, it left a lot to be desired—but then, Anders was no expert on sleeping in Tevinter. And he couldn’t deny that it felt _comforting_ somehow to see Fenris back to looking normal, or as normal as Fenris could get.

Anders reached up to tug at the knotted the silk scarves at his throat, now damp and probably ruined with his sweat. The full weight of all they’d been through that day, not to mention the strain of the parts they’d both been forced to play, hit Anders all at once and without warning, their force even more exhausting than much of the time he’d spent wearing that collar.

He was bone-weary, trampled, worn ragged and worn out. What was more, whatever Fenris had just said didn’t make any sense, and it was clearly up to Anders to convey that to him—perhaps he’d taken more wine than Anders realized. ‘But where will _you_ sleep? Not _in there_ …’

The words were out before he could help himself. Predictably, Fenris’s expression curdled like milk left out in the sun.

‘ _No,_ ’ he said, stepping over the pile of his fine clothes, leaving them where they lay. He cast a glance toward the bedroom door, then seemed to steel himself, posture straightening. ‘I have no intention of sleeping in this house.’

‘Now that’s just silly,’ Anders said, sitting down hard on the bed. It was wonderfully soft; he could barely summon the energy necessary to untie his boots before falling backward onto the down coverlet, resting like a gentle cloud atop the mattress. ‘You’ll find yourself getting _quite_ tired if you do that, Fenris. Or you’ll get bored. _Or_ you could wake up Bodahn, and then we’d all be very sorry indeed.’

‘Hn,’ Fenris said, another of his sounds that meant nothing—neither dismissal nor acceptance, untroubled by the unimportance of someone else’s words. Anders sat up again, back aching, seeking him out in the dim light. He was poised by the door like a burglar, long, lean muscle obscured and exaggerated by the swooping cut-outs in his armor. ‘I imagine there’s more than enough in a house belonging to some alternate version of myself to keep me occupied for the night.’

The lamplight flickered, and Anders felt a streak of something simultaneously very cold and very hot run down his spine.

In the clinic, there had always been people about, patients resting on the cots scattered through the main workspace, hopeless cases arriving anywhere from the crack of dawn to the middle of the night. Anders had never needed to think about living alone underground in Darktown because he hadn’t even _been_ alone there.

And then there’d been—his other roommate, that other passenger, his constant companion, his _plus one_ at all the dinner parties.

There was Hawke, too, always nearby; Isabela, always determined to remain unfettered by boundaries; Varric, always whistling some unfamiliar tune near the fire or beneath the sunlight; even Merrill, head bent low and murmuring in conversation with Carver, words that melted in and out of Anders’s thoughts, in and out of his understanding. But he didn’t have to understand them—he just had to hear them. That they were there was what mattered most.

Anders hadn’t been alone since he woke up that morning in that awful little room, and he had no desire to return to that state now—no matter _how_ fine and large the bedroom was, it would all shrink down to nothing if there was no one else to fill it.

Just like he had.

‘Don’t—’ Anders blurted, sacrificing his dignity for speed as Fenris made to leave. ‘Don’t,’ he said again, more quietly this second time. As though repeating a thing could help inure him to the sound, or obscure some of its power, so that it wouldn’t gleam quite so desperately in the dark. ‘That is to say… I’d rather not be alone, if it’s all the same to you.’

It only occurred to Anders _after_ he’d said it just how much everything had been turned on its head. He’d never have allowed himself to ask anything like that of anyone at home—Justice had prevented sublimation, despite some of Hawke’s best efforts to help a fellow mage keep his head above water, and there was never any promise of it after that.

Fenris huffed, but he released the latch all the same; after a moment’s imprecision, he changed course, coming to sit at the end of the bed. Anders watched his hunched back, white tattoos snaking over his skin, disappearing beneath the dark plating of his armor and reappearing again in the unlikeliest of places. When it became apparent that Fenris wasn’t going to move, Anders took the initiative, rising on his knees to pull the canopy curtains around the bed shut.

‘No need,’ Fenris muttered.

‘But Fenris,’ Anders said, a desperation in his voice he didn’t like, but couldn’t silence, ‘what would _Bodahn_ think? He _is_ getting on in years—you said so yourself.’

Fenris huffed, the little noise a cat made when it grew tired of an unsatisfactory distraction, batting some dead thing between its idle paws. Anders hushed, then looped the fabric of the canopy in place. Faint light shone through the chiffon, Anders rubbing at it thoughtfully between thumb and forefinger. It was soft to the touch, practically woven of nothing at all. He saw it tickling over Fenris’s legs and the backs of his hands, snagging on the sharper edges of his armor; Fenris made no move to free himself, and Anders didn’t think it appropriate, didn’t think it right, to lean over and help him with it.

Instead, he leaned back on the balls his feet, toes digging deep into the mattress, enjoying the freedom of movement he was currently afforded. Being weary didn’t always mean a man would sleep, or sleep well, and Anders knew that when he got this tired he had a tendency to pass straight through the need for sleep and out the other side of manic.

It was possible Fenris was the same way.

Anders’s ability to stretch his imagination and compare the two of them only lasted for so long; it came to a halt the moment he realized Fenris was glowing again, dimly, lyrium song in the distance, buried beneath his skin. Anders scratched at his cheek, needing those little touches, those little sounds, to remind himself of where he was, and who he was in the midst of that.

He was Anders, a man who often forgot to shave. There were bruises on his throat. He liked nice things, comfortable bed and pretty curtains and delicate embroidery. They were all details that made sense, separately but especially together—yet there was something missing, the linchpin it needed to _work_ , or rather approximate the conclusion of a _real person_.

Anders sighed.

‘You really don’t intend to sleep here at all?’ he asked.

Fenris—infuriatingly certain of himself, as always—simply said: ‘No.’

Anders prodded, gingerly, at the injured flesh on his throat, the tender skin and sore bone of his jawline. He noticed Fenris twitching, too, rocking faintly forward, then leaning back, the bed-frame creaking as he shifted in place. It all made Anders very anxious, more than he was already. At the same time, the subtle rhythm soothed him.

In other words, he had no idea what he was thinking, much less what he was feeling, just a jumbled mess of nervous contradictions, as baffling to himself as he hadn’t been since pubescence.

‘Right. Of course,’ he said. ‘You mentioned that already. And why change your mind, really? Just…drive yourself to exhaustion. That makes sense.’

‘I have no other choice.’ Fenris’s fingers seized sharply against his thighs, then eased again, flattening slowly against the stiff leather. ‘I _cannot_ sleep here.’

‘Ah,’ Anders murmured. This time, he didn’t even have to try to be understanding.

A threadbare silence stretched between them, not entirely awkward, not entirely meaning anything. The small comfort Anders had managed to eke out from simply knowing Fenris was there—from feeling him, the hiss and rush of buried lyrium beating along with his pulse—wasn’t as soothing as it would have been, if Fenris was the sort who could choose to help someone fill a silence. Anders bit his lower lip, unconsciously mirroring with his hands the same ritual action Fenris’s were currently engaged in: rubbing at his thighs, curling his fingers inward, then relaxing them, before repeating the entire process over again.

Fenris couldn’t sleep here. Of course not. But, Anders was starting to understand, _he_ probably couldn’t sleep _anywhere_. Not anymore. Not without crossing into the Fade, without Justice, perhaps even running _into_ Justice, who was very vengeful lately, and—

Anders had to say something. Otherwise, come morning, they’d both be curled up into balls, arms wrapped around their knees, rocking in place.

‘How about a story,’ Anders suggested weakly. ‘Fenris—do you know any stories?’

‘No,’ Fenris said.

That appeared to be his favorite word.

‘Of course you do,’ Anders insisted. ‘Stories are just…things, events, moments, that have happened to you already, only with the names all changed so no one gets angry with you.’

That gave Fenris pause. He still wouldn’t look Anders’s way, like everyone else seemed incapable of doing, but he wasn’t avoiding him for the same reasons as everyone else, and that meant something.

At length, Fenris cleared his throat. ‘Nothing that’s happened to _me_ is appropriate for a bedtime story,’ he said, with a hint of venom, though Anders thought privately it sounded rather weary of itself, all things considered.

‘Me neither,’ Anders agreed, attempting to make it come across as ribald and lusty. Naturally, Fenris didn’t find it amusing. Neither did Anders, incapable of maintaining his end of the façade without some outside help to accompany him.

He fell silent again—silence now, and always more silence—listening to his petty, private thoughts rattle against the empty corners of his mind, seeking confidence and contradiction and finding only weak-willed agreement. Anders lifted his hand to his temple, pressing the tip of his forefinger against it, allowing himself a moment of weakness—as though this kind of healing was as simple as a burst of arcane heat.

Over the thrum of his own aching pulse, Anders heard Fenris clear his throat again. ‘There was once an elf who was taken as a slave,’ he began, haltingly, with a misdirected kindness that made Anders feel, suddenly, extremely grateful, if not completely happy.

‘No, no,’ he tutted. ‘That was… A very bad idea all around. And I was— I was wrong to suggest it.’

‘I am not one for stories,’ Fenris agreed.

Anders had a moment of wondering—brief and ill-advised—how Fenris had occupied his time back in his slave days, if that was true. Without _stories,_ the one surefire means any prisoner had for escaping without ever leaving his cell, how on earth had he kept his sanity intact? Anders had an all-too clear picture of it in his mind: Fenris locked alone in that dark room, collar heavy against his chest, with nothing at all to occupy him but his thoughts, no imagination whatsoever beyond the present, or what lay just through the door.

The mere idea made Anders feel strangled with misery. There was something comforting about only being able to generalize; he’d been quite content before, without the ability to empathize with others, and no understanding left for their personal plights.

It wasn’t a talent he’d missed.

‘Well,’ Anders said, because he had to say _something._ One did, in these situations—or so he’d been led to believe. He turned down the coverlet to reveal soft, thin silks beneath, wriggling promptly under the blankets without further hesitation. If he thought about the truly _surreal_ nature of his situation at present—lying in a Tevinter magister’s bed with Fenris curled up at its end like a faithful warhound—he’d probably start laughing and never be able to stop. He certainly wouldn’t have been able to sleep.

‘ _Well,_ ’ Fenris repeated, tucking a knee up under his chin. This act of unabashed repetition was close to becoming their inside joke— _theirs_ , the idea so strange that Anders had to pause and marvel over it—a routine they shared, and possibly needed, in order to get by.

This right here was all going to make for a very good story, one day. Anders would repeat the whole thing to Varric, and—being a sensible dwarf, when his nose wasn’t buried in Isabela’s cleavage—Varric would spin it into real magic.

‘You never know what might happen.’ Anders stretched his legs and prayed he didn’t accidentally kick Fenris in the process. The pillow smelled of wine and one of the creams Anders had gone rooting around in—not like Fenris at all, like leather and lyrium and warm skin. Which was a good thing, no doubt, as that might well have been the final straw. ‘We could wake up tomorrow, and everything will be back the way it was.’

From his vigil at the bedpost, Fenris let out a snort. ‘Magic does not give such gifts freely. It knows only how to take them away.’

‘Good point,’ Anders muttered, drawing the covers up to his chin. ‘Very cheerful. Thank you.’

He didn’t remember closing his eyes, but every time he jerked to attention, trying to hide from the whispers of the Fade, Fenris was there, glowing gently in the dark.

The lamp burned through its oil after a few hours, but Fenris remained irritatingly constant, until finally Anders was forced to admit his paranoia was no longer as alluring as the sleep that threatened to claim him. He dozed off, and if he dreamt of anything—if he did indeed venture into the Fade—he remembered nothing of it the next morning.

*

Being the first to sleep, Anders was naturally the first to rise, alongside the narrow sliver of light peering in through the curtains. It was a _good_ morning, by sheer virtue of the fact that he’d woken _without_ a fearsome collar strapped around his neck like a lost piece of qunari war-armor. Anders stretched and yawned, rubbing a hand over his mouth and the thickening stubble at his chin. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of something dark and solid, hopelessly tangled in the gauzy, pale fabric of the bed’s canopy.

Fenris was sleeping half-in, half-out of the bed, his body twisted around in a way that looked beastly uncomfortable, not to mention slightly inhuman. His chest rose and fell in an even rhythm; every now and then one of his armored hands twitched, or his eyelids would flutter, as though he was still experiencing the deepest part of the sleeping cycle, where the dreamer at last entered the Fade.

Anders’s instincts as a healer took over without warning; he pushed back his own tangle of covers, crossing the bed on his knees, determined to stop Fenris’s neck from bending at that horrible angle. First, he decided, it would be best to pry him loose from the clutches of the nefarious canopy; all the rest would come later.

That was Fenris for you. He could slaughter a nest of giant spiders, spearhead the charge into a Tal-Vashoth camp and _still_ have enough energy to tear through a dockside warehouse full of slavers, but get him in a fancy bed and it proved to be his undoing. Anders would have laughed, but somehow he didn’t feel it was his joke. It certainly wasn’t his place.

Instead, he tugged carefully at the fabric pinned beneath Fenris’s arm, fingers brushing against the bare skin near his shoulder.

All at once, Fenris’s eyes snapped open. Before Anders could react—before he could wish him a cheerful _Good morning, we’re still in Tevinter, but it’s not all bad news, since no one’s situation got any worse overnight, or at least mine didn’t, and how’s your neck feeling, because Maker, that looked uncomfortable_ —there were steel talons wrapped around his throat and a hand at his shoulder, whirling him away and knocking him flat on his back. The mattress creaked in protest at such violent treatment, and the canopy overhead shivered.

Fenris stared down at Anders, pupils blown, his green eyes wild and unguarded. Breathing unsteadily, he relaxed his grip on Anders’s throat a half-second later, seeming to come back to himself, though his lips were still curved in the makings of a snarl.

‘Urk,’ Anders said.

The muscles in Fenris’s jaw worked hard; something like surprise made his eyes widen. His lips parted, and a hot gust of wine-breath skirted over Anders’s cheek. Against his throat—already so abused—Fenris’s fingers twitched, then abruptly released their hold, while Anders gasped and choked, unable to prevent himself from making a big deal out of it.

‘There are some people you do not _wake_ so carelessly,’ Fenris hissed, reeling away, all awkward limbs and tense body. Brittle, as though he were made entirely of bone.

Anders had fought a dragon made entirely of bone once, with the Hero of Ferelden in Amaranthine. There was something similar about its spiny vertebrae and Fenris as he was now, back arched—but Anders supposed, if he had to classify the moment, it had been more like stepping on a cat’s tail while it was sleeping than anything else, the subsequent yowl and unsheathing of claws to be expected, given the circumstances.

‘You were caught in the—’ Anders swallowed. ‘I was trying to—’ Then, he decided that excuses were pointless, flimsy and unnecessary; Fenris had already made up his mind about the incident, and was suitably defensive, and Anders’s throat hurt too much for proper protest. ‘I won’t be making _that_ mistake again,’ he said instead, hoarsely, having finally caught his breath. His pulse was still racing, and Fenris glowing brighter than ever—though the effect was somewhat diminished when contrasted with direct sunlight.

‘If you are capable of learning from your mistakes, that is.’ Fenris took a moment to do battle with the curtains—Anders winced at the sound the sheer fabric made, torn on one of his finger-guards; he was beginning to understand why Fenris’s place in Hightown had always been such a shambling mess—then broke free at last, surprisingly light as he stormed from the bed.

Anders held onto his throat for a moment longer. When his fingers came away, there was the faintest streak of blood against them, and he lifted his hand above his head to stare at it, wondering at the sight.

Justice would have killed Fenris for that; there was no question. At least he would have tried. Danarius’s summer pavilion would have been ruined just a scorch mark beside the wide street, Bodahn cowering in the rubble.

But Anders had no one to protect him like that anymore, to make the grand gestures, to go a little overboard when it came to self-defense. The sight of his own blood, especially such small quantities of it, didn’t make him feel anything other than faintly nervous, and under an idle pass of his hand, he healed the scratches without a second thought.

‘No need to apologize,’ he said, sliding out of bed with a bit more grace than Fenris had displayed, and padding quietly across the floor to find his boots. He winced when he saw them again, in the full light of day, with a better-rested pair of eyes: the holes in the toes and heels, places where the leather had been worn completely through, as though Anders had been dragged along behind the army of zealous templars for the entirety of the Exalted March.

Knowing his luck, he probably had.

Fenris, lingering by the vanity, arms folded, his knees just slightly bent, shifted his weight from one side to the other. Anders wondered if he’d been watching, if he was readying pointed commentary about how _some_ people didn’t even need boots at all.

‘Oh well,’ Anders said, gamely pulling the first on one. He wiggled his toes, observing his socks through one of the large holes—his socks, which also had holes in them. Naturally. ‘I’ve worn worse, I suppose.’

He was going to say more, something to lighten the mood and ease the tension, to make Fenris stop _lurking_ so wretchedly, when someone cleared his throat in the doorway. It was Bodahn, of course, having let himself in, catching Anders in a half-crouch, half-squat, causing him to trip over his other boot and bang his shin against the tiled floor.

Anders was beginning to suspect Bodahn did these things on purpose. He might have been getting on in years, but he hadn’t lost that sparkle of mischief in his unfathomable dwarven eyes. He had to get his jollies in somehow, and subtly torturing people was apparently _it_ for him.

‘Pardon me for interrupting, my lord,’ he said. Though his hands were clasped neatly behind his back, he managed to bow without also losing his balance. In so many ways, he was a miracle worker. ‘But his highness _Sebastian Vael_ is here to see you, ser, and—’

Even Bodahn, with all his finesse—so smooth he could barely read the temperature of a room, even when it shifted dramatically—hesitated upon seeing the look Anders wore. It wasn’t exactly an expression Fenris’s face was capable of forming, but nonetheless, Anders felt safe in assuming they were both equally gaping and frozen by their own forms of uncertainty.

‘…That doesn’t please you, Master Fenris?’ Bodahn asked, tentatively.

‘Do not _call_ me that,’ Fenris demanded in return, then faltered, as though the ferocity of his own voice had finally managed to surprise even him. Or maybe it was more that it had come out as a command, when the very nature of the thing insisted it should have been a request. ‘Do not,’ he amended, the words grindingly firm.

‘Oh, yes, that—of course,’ Bodahn murmured. ‘It is _so_ hard to remember, Ma…ssere. Messere. Ser. Lord Fenris. That is to say, I already let him _in_ , ser, and he’s waiting for you right now, in the…’ He paused, but only for a fraction of a moment. ‘…the sitting room.’

Then, he waited, to learn whether he’d assumed right or wrong, what manner of mood his master intended to visit upon him today.

Anders didn’t particularly care. The man who arguably wanted him dead—for the most personal of reasons, rather than something less offensive and more general—was currently sitting downstairs, in the very same house. He was a prince, and Anders was a slave with holes in his boots, and he couldn’t help but feel slighted by that, beyond the tightening of his ribcage around his heart.

‘I…’ Fenris’s voice betrayed nothing, and yet Anders thought it also said it all. ‘…will join him in a moment,’ he concluded at last. ‘Go. Now. I wish to be…alone.’

‘Of course, ma—my lord,’ Bodahn said, with an accompanying bow. ‘I’ll see that he’s made comfortable until your arrival.’

That Sebastian should be comfortable in a world like _this_ one seemed altogether too fitting. Anders knew he was being uncharitable—mean, and possibly _unforgiving,_ but even as he was now, he felt no need to forgive anyone. Including, or perhaps especially, Sebastian Vael. And that was how things had been left between them on either side; at least it was mutual.

Anders and Fenris had their differences—had nothing _but_ differences it seemed like, on some days—but when the time had come, Fenris hadn’t abandoned them for Sebastian or the templars.

Anders supposed he could be grateful for that, now that his head was clearer. The comparison was even more obvious now, in the midst of his fear, and the throbbing in his kneecap.

Still, it wasn’t something he’d be mentioning anytime soon.

Fenris raked his gaze over him, eyes taking in every last hole, torn seam and stain in Anders’s clothing—there were a great many of them, so it took him a while. When he was done, he scratched at his arm, nails delicately finding the space between scrolling lines of lyrium to do so. Anders wondered whether he ever touched the tattoos. There were so many of them that it seemed impossible _not_ to.

Finally, when the scrutiny became too much to bear, Anders let out a delicate cough.

The sound seemed to make Fenris snap back to attention. But instead of looking away, he stepped even closer to Anders, eyes falling to his neck. Anders swallowed anxiously, feeling the shadow of every bruise as his throat bobbed. Was he looking for evidence of this morning’s damage? Or just trying to see how Anders was healing after a full night of wearing a proper _slave’s vestments?_ Anders couldn’t tell, and it seemed rather awkward to ask. Instead, he kept his eyes fixed on the mirror at the far wall, trying not to marvel at what an utterly bizarre picture they made together—a master and his slave, and yet a perversion of everything Tevinter was meant to represent.

It was a marvel.

It made Anders feel ill.

‘Tch,’ Fenris said, looking around to find the collar, abandoned in the corner of the room where they’d left it in disgust the night after Hawke’s dinner party. Anders, feeling particularly generous of spirit that morning thanks to getting some rest, was willing to admit that the only person who hated that contraption more than he did was Fenris himself.

Which was why he wouldn’t make Anders put it on again so soon after abusing his poor neck. …Would he?

‘ _Tch,_ ’ Anders repeated hopefully, making it into a word instead of a noise. A cheerful conversation starter he already knew would fall flat on its face.

Sure enough, Fenris let out a sigh that sounded more like a huff of frustration, tearing his eyes away and stalking toward the door. ‘Don’t bother with that _thing._ I have the right to do anything I so please in my own house.’

‘You mean like let it rot away around you and not even bother to clean up the moldering corpses someone else left in it?’ Anders offered, remembering Fenris’s mansion in Hightown. His heart was still pounding at the thought of Sebastian waiting downstairs—they hadn’t seen the man in three years, after he’d threatened to bring an army to Kirkwall just so he could murder Anders personally, and that was rather the point. Avoiding him. The reunion was never meant to be pretty.

Hawke had held his line firmly, refusing to give an inch. Obviously, things had been different here. Things were _still_ different here, and Anders already knew that they were going to have to do more to escape than entertain disturbing visitors all day and hope to wake up in the right place the next morning. It hadn’t worked yesterday, in any case. He had no hope for it working tomorrow, or really, no _hope_ at all.

‘Mage,’ Fenris said, snapping Anders free of his thoughts. ‘Do something about your neck before you join us. I’m sick of looking at it.’

He was gone before Anders could offer any kind of a retort. _So sorry the obvious physical effects of my suffering displease you, master,_ but even without saying it, Anders knew it would be cruel. He’d been holding off on using his magic unnecessarily, but there was no reason why—alone now, in the master bedroom—he couldn’t restore his throat to a less tender incarnation of itself. He’d fixed the scratches, after all. There was no reason not to go deeper.

Fenris had left so he wouldn’t have to watch; that much was obvious. Anders knew how he felt about magic—would have known if he’d only met Fenris ten minutes ago instead of ten _years_ —but he still couldn’t help but wonder: did he ever wish _he_ could heal himself, trapped in that collar, day after day?

Perhaps that was why he’d been the one to suggest it.

*

Anders knew the way from the master bedroom to the sitting room, but he still found himself trying to get lost somewhere between the two. The only reason he was going at _all_ was out of a sense of fellowship for Fenris—not wanting him to be left alone with an unfamiliar Sebastian—and a dread sense of curiosity that compounded the other, nobler impulse, strengthening it.

Sebastian and Fenris had gotten along together quite well in their heyday, Anders remembered, not without some bitterness—but Fenris _had_ stayed while Sebastian had left, so obviously there’d been something transpiring in the elf’s mind that Anders wasn’t privy to.

Whatever the case, Anders wasn’t about to abandon Fenris to the mad prince of Starkhaven. Even if he wanted to rather badly, to make Sebastian someone else’s problem, and not his own.

But it was the sound of Sebastian Vael’s voice that gave Anders pause, a fierce shiver that lanced from the base of his spine to the top of his neck, then trickled back again, with slower, colder dread.

‘…told the Divine I was _incredibly_ grateful for her offer,’ Sebastian was in the midst of saying, somewhere just beyond the doorframe, ‘but my place is here in Minrathous, to set an example in case this little group of rebels should attempt something serious.’

The last time Anders heard that voice, it had certainly left its mark. Anders had repeated the concepts to himself more often than he cared to admit, _precious Anders_ and _true justice_ —as though Sebastian didn’t realize Anders was the only one who knew what justice was, or rather _who_ Justice was, completely, thoroughly, without mercy or pause. It was all so personal with him, not really a matter of an act of Justice _or_ justice, or anything in between. In fact, it was pure Vengeance, something they had in common, something Anders could understand.

And now that he wasn’t so much a part of it, he was capable of fearing it, as well.

Fenris made a noncommittal noise in his throat. Anders supposed it was time to face his fears—not that he’d ever been particularly good at that—and rounded the corner, stepping into the room at last.

Sebastian looked well—a bit more tan than usual, a bit more armored, but just as polished, just as well-groomed, with the same excellent posture. There was certainly no comparing his condition to Anders’s, the white sheen of his breastplate in the sunlight—sunlight that also glinted off the beatific face of Andraste, Sebastian’s partner in all things, despite her unfortunate position, shoved into his lap.

Anders tried to muster some agony, some hatred, some kind of feeling at all other than weariness, and beyond that, befuddled amusement. But the scene was far too ridiculous: Sebastian, healthy as ever, clear blue gaze positively royal in its affectations, sitting beside Fenris on one of the many couches, surrounded by an entire retinue of slaves.

 _Mage slaves_ , Anders corrected himself, though he only knew it because of the way they looked at him. Grateful, accusatory, sad—all the makings of regret, regret which always sought out a focal point for blame. And then there was surprise, when they noticed the one thing that separated them, that somehow Anders was uncollared, unfettered, mocking them with his own mockery of freedom.

There might have been more. But Anders really couldn’t look at them so closely. Even a cursory glance in their direction made it very hard to breathe.

Anders dug his nails into his palms. If Justice had been here, his wealth of sympathy would have curdled to a wealth of rage by now—but instead, Anders had nothing more useful than pity, equally merciless, equally unwieldy, but not equally effective. He felt guilty, even though he didn’t think he really should have; he also wanted to remove all their collars to the last, but he wasn’t Justice _or_ Vengeance anymore, and hesitation framed his every desire now, hindering his every impulse. He knew he could no more cross the room to commit such an act of necessary daring than he could sprout a tail and whiskers and curl up in Fenris’s lap for pets.

He stayed where he was, frozen in place, frozen in time, waiting for someone else to do something—because he’d already done quite enough.

Slowly, Sebastian shifted his focus. Unlike the others, he refused to look through Anders like any old slave; his expression twitched when he noticed what everyone else had, that Fenris was eccentric enough to let Anders scamper around _not_ chained to a big lump of unforgiving metal. Anders half-expected him to reach for his bow and nock it with one of the well-fletched arrows in his quiver.

But the look he wore was wounding enough. It reduced Anders to a combination of failed deeds and broken parts, until he _felt_ that collar closing around his throat, and _heard_ that final lock snap into place.

‘Ah,’ Sebastian said. ‘My greatest success, in the flesh. And yet I can’t help noticing, Fenris, that he has been given free reign of the household. Tell me—what is the secret to your intentions?’

Anders fought the urge to turn everything on its head. So many people—complete strangers, yet he could at least recognize the despair in their eyes as something they all shared—were watching him, perhaps waiting for a sign. They wanted to know what it all meant, but Anders certainly had no idea. Whether this had happened for him to bring hope to all mages—a second time, or rather, a first _real_ time—was irrelevant now, since Anders no longer had the tools to make that a reality. He no longer had the vitality, the strength of character, or even the passion.

He only had a pair of dirty boots, a torn coat of black feathers, and an overabundance of stubble. He couldn’t imagine what these people were thinking. He couldn’t imagine how badly he’d disappointed them all.

‘There is no secret,’ Fenris said, his voice piercing the silence, the weighted pause of _everyone breathing_ and _wanting_ and _waiting._ ‘A man does not always need a collar to know he has been chained.’

This statement, for whatever awful reason, seemed to please Sebastian. He drummed his fingers lithely against his knee, satisfied by the explanation, his posture relaxing as he leaned in toward Fenris’s side. ‘Well said—well said, indeed, Fenris. You’ve always been of few words, but you use them better than any I’ve ever met. I trust you more with the man _I_ caught than any other. Even myself.’

If only he’d stop saying that, Anders wished distantly, in the part of him still capable of making wishes. It was impossible to remember something if it hadn’t happened to him, but Anders could picture it all too well: being hunted between trees or across an open plain, or through Kirkwall’s hexes, perhaps, driving him toward the water, backing him into a corner—because he’d been hunted before, quite a few times, and he’d never been very _good_ at fleeing. The odds hadn’t even been fair with only a handful of Ferelden’s most bumbling templars.

Sebastian Vael was a prince. He had an entire army.

Fenris shifted awkwardly on the couch, uncomfortable with Sebastian’s close proximity. That much was obvious even to Anders, which meant it probably _should_ have been obvious to Sebastian, who was behaving as though the pair of them were very good friends indeed. Perhaps even closer than that, which was a thought altogether too nauseating to contemplate

Anders wanted very badly to leave, or at least find a comfortable bit of floor to sit down on, but moving meant drawing attention to himself, and he was quite keen to _avoid_ any more Starkhaven dissertations at present.

He hovered uncertainly instead, ignoring the sound of clinking chains as the mages on the ground tried to make themselves more comfortable, ignoring the sight of Sebastian’s hand as it drifted from his own knee to Fenris’s, thumb curling over leather.

‘Sebastian,’ Fenris said. He wriggled elegantly away, mouth turned down in a scowl. For once, Anders wasn’t embarrassed by his unbelievable lack of social graces. In fact, he found he was rather pleased. ‘What are you doing here?’ Then, when that sounded too curt even to Fenris’s sharp ears, he modified the question. ‘This is…an impressive retinue for a social call.’

Sebastian sighed, retracting his hand to rub at the shell of his own ear. ‘Immediately to business, is that it? Yes, you’ve always been like that, haven’t you—and more’s the pity. Diligent, hardworking…’ He flashed his perfect white teeth in a smile Anders was only too glad to look away from. ‘You were my very _own_ Shartan, you know. You served his purpose in a way that did the Maker proud.’

Anders was glad he’d averted his gaze, because he was suddenly overcome with the urge to heave right there in the sitting room. No one—not even the heroes in the three-copper romances Anders had hidden and read in the Circle library—ever dreamed of speaking like that. And—were Anders’s ears deceiving him? Did that statement mean Sebastian fancied _himself_ to be the second coming of Andraste? It was all too much to bear. The absurd urge to laugh fought its way through Anders’s misery, and he quickly spun it into a reedy cough instead.

Fenris cleared his throat almost immediately, no doubt attempting to drown out the sound. Either that, or he’d grown equal parts bored and appalled by the conversation, and sought a swift conclusion.

Anders didn’t blame him. No one wanted to be compared to a figure of great religious importance—no one except Sebastian himself, of course, who clearly thought it was the highest form of flattery.

‘Flattery,’ Fenris noted, in a dry tone that made Anders oddly proud. ‘You’re avoiding the subject. Even if you don’t value your own time, you might have some respect for mine.’

‘You _wound_ me, Fenris,’ Sebastian said. Anders turned his head just in time to catch him putting a _hand_ over his _heart._ ‘The news isn’t unpleasant, if that’s what you’re thinking. Quite the contrary, in fact. They’ve finally made preparations for the Archon trials to begin—they’re closing off the arena for a full week. This is everything we’ve waited for.’

‘And?’ Fenris said, voice low and impatient. His arms were crossed, his eyes on the far window, beyond the slaves and Sebastian and Anders and everything else within the four walls of the room. Anders couldn’t help but listen, dreading whatever came next. He held little sympathy for the archons of the Imperium, but he remained firm in his conviction that anything _Sebastian_ was excited about could only spell trouble.

Sebastian moved his hand to the top of Fenris’s spiky armored gauntlet. He paused, meaningfully, and bowed his head—not in shame, but for the drama of the whole ordeal. ‘I’ve come to ask you to be my champion in the ring, of course. There’s none better in Minrathous, and I thought we could see this through together, all the way to its end. …For old times’ sake, Fenris.’

Of course, Anders realized, the only _trials_ that would call for an entire arena to be closed off would be a trial by combat. And, if he understood everything correctly, Fenris had enjoyed some success as a gladiator during his time here. But that had been _another_ elf, another Fenris, one whom Sebastian apparently thought of as Shartan reborn—there was no way for them to fake something like this with any form of success.

Fenris was going to have to decline.

He must have been thinking along the same lines; Anders chanced another look in his direction when the silence stretched out long and thin between them in the sitting room. Even the other mage-slaves had fallen silent, everyone waiting to hear his reply.

‘You did not consider…asking Hawke?’ Fenris said after a moment, his tone uncertain.

‘ _Hawke?_ ’ Sebastian scoffed. ‘The man has none of your finesse, _nor_ your ruthless nature. I might as well send _your mage_ in to do the fighting for you.’

‘Oh come now,’ said a voice from the doorway, gruff and just slightly out of breath. ‘Surely _that_ isn’t fair. I’m twice the size of Anders, at least. I bet he couldn’t even lift my sword.’

Anders couldn’t help the swell of gratitude that rose in his heart at the sound of that voice—even while understanding that it didn’t belong to _his_ friend, the man with impeccable timing who always knew when he was needed most, or least, and acted accordingly. There was something comforting about the presence of _any_ Hawke—and Anders would happily take him over an incarnation of Sebastian any day.

 _Hawke_ , he almost said, relieved, so very grateful. Then, he remembered Hawke wasn’t here for him, but for Fenris, or for some other reason; Anders really couldn’t tell with these people anymore. But certainly the day he planned on saving had nothing to do with Anders; they barely knew one another, after all.

Eventually, Anders told himself, he was going to have to stop relying on other people. Sometimes those other people had thick, dark beards; sometimes, they wore his own face, and used his hands, his staff, and his name. The only thing they all had in common was that they weren’t him, _Anders_ , the sole of his foot against the sun-warmed tiles of the floor, pushing through a cracked leather bootheel.

Eventually, he would. But not yet. He wasn’t ready. Sometimes he wasn’t sure if he ever would be.

‘Hawke,’ Fenris said. It was uncanny how he’d started doing that, how they were beginning to sound the same in Anders’s head, or at least have the same thoughts. The whole point of Fenris, Anders tried to remind himself, was that they _never_ had the same thoughts. He was almost completely certain their problems with one another _hadn’t_ been due to overbearing similarities. It was supposed to be the opposite, in fact.

‘Fenris,’ Hawke agreed.

‘Hawke,’ Sebastian added, not quite as friendly as he’d sounded before.

‘ _Sebastian_ ,’ Hawke replied.

Anders wanted, strangely enough, to play too, but he clamped down on the urge and bit down on his lower lip, feeling nameless, adrift, unwanted—only the mages were watching him, and they could probably note the moment he went cross-eyed with concentration, every wince when he remembered they were still there. He had to stop forgetting important things, like who he was, not to mention where, the lack of any _why_ ; but the knowledge came and went just as quickly as his focus, his resolve, and his understanding.

‘Anyway,’ Hawke continued, ‘a little bird told me _you_ were here, my lord prince of Starkhaven and master of the Exalted March, and I couldn’t bear the idea of you passing through without having the chance to see you again, or at _least_ to see my own reflection in your magnificent armor.’ He flashed a grin. ‘And, just as expected: I _do_ look handsome.’

‘Charming, as always, Hawke,’ Sebastian said. To Fenris, as though Hawke had disappeared the moment he ceased to be entertaining, he said, ‘You accept my offer, I assume?’

‘Offer?’ Hawke tried to lean casually in the doorway. It didn’t entirely work. ‘What offer? My _goodness_ , I feel like I’ve missed so much.’

Sebastian nodded for Fenris to speak, with a gracious gesture of one white-gloved hand. Anders stared at the shadows it cast along the floor.

‘Sebastian has requested that _I_ be his Champion at the trials,’ Fenris said bluntly. As if it were all really so simple that one single sentence could encompass everything.

There was rather more to it than that—such as _I’m not the elf you think I am_ and _if I accepted this offer, that would make me even madder than Anders over there_ —but Fenris didn’t seem to think any of that was important, much less necessary. He spoke the truth, Maker help them all, and seemed to think that was all he needed to make sense.

‘Of _course_ he has,’ Hawke said. He tried to inspect a fingernail. ‘Why fight for yourself when you can _request_ someone else do it for you—is that it? How very _noble_ of you. Just _like_ nobility, in fact.’

‘Standards, Hawke,’ Sebastian said. ‘I think we can both agree Fenris is better suited for the job than anyone here.’

‘And it doesn’t matter so much when _he_ scratches his armor, either,’ Hawke confirmed, jaw tight.

Anders did his best to imagine what he would have done—if he were given the opportunity to serve as jury and executioner for a handful of Knight-Commanders, for example. But even then, with his vast store of bitter feelings, all of them brought to light the moment Justice slipped from Kristoff’s decaying corpse into Anders’s rather more animate body, he wasn’t certain. All he’d done—and he remembered the night, in a flash of heat and light blown orange over a column of smoke, a swell of inexorable determination, the knowledge that _this was it_ , whatever _this_ or _it_ even was—had been from a distance, a single action, nothing more than the impetus for change. With his own hands, yes, but again, _again_ , Vengeance had never been personal, because it maintained more of its essence, its justice, than Anders could have admitted or explained.

Besides which, it wouldn’t have been fair. On both sides. Mages fighting warriors—someone was always bound to have the upper hand, in that way Anders couldn’t accept, or even think about now.

But Fenris, just like Anders, had every reason to want to fight, to bring justice to his oppressors. A collection of magisters in the ring—Anders knew, sneaky and guilty and disturbed as the suspicion was, that it was the sort of thing almost anyone would agree to. Even if they didn’t have to do it for the sake of keeping up appearances.

Anders looked to Fenris for some clue, but of course, his face remained impassive. There was nothing to read on it, no twitch of discomfort or glow of lyrium, nothing but a person, whom Anders thought he might have been able to understand—then told himself _no_ , that it couldn’t be right, that they’d never know one another. How could they, after all that had happened? So much time, so much distance. All they did and didn’t know about each other.

‘I accept your offer,’ Fenris said, with a bow of his head.

Hawke’s noise of distress was exactly how Anders felt—a combination of so many different, unhappy reactions—while Sebastian smiled and Fenris remained unreadable, not a blank page, but one written in white ink across dark vellum, something important hidden in each scroll and swirl.

*

‘You accepted,’ Anders said later, when everyone was gone—Sebastian and his retinue to take care of important business, no doubt, and Hawke more reluctantly, never quite bringing himself to argue with Fenris’s decision, but certainly not pleased with it, either.

Anders, however, had no compunction about sounding accusatory. And so he did.

‘I accepted,’ Fenris agreed, this game they played now so much _fun_ , especially because Fenris had such a knack for winning.

‘So we’re just going to leave it at that, are we?’ Anders asked, rubbing the thick scruff at his neck in an attempt to ground himself, to remember who he was and _where_ he was and also, how badly he needed to shave. ‘You’re going to fight for Sebastian—who’s even _more_ awful than I remember him being; I didn’t even think that was possible—in an arena full of merciless archons who’ve been told they have to fight for their _lives?_ Congratulations. I don’t know that there’s actually a _worse_ idea you could have come up with. Though I’m sure I’ll think of one, if you only give me a moment.’

Fenris scowled, fingers curling around the neck of a bottle Bodahn had brought out while Fenris was still entertaining their guests. Anders was beginning to feel just the _slightest_ bit of concern for the fact that he still hadn’t seen a morsel of food pass Fenris’s lips this entire time. Perhaps there was something in his constitution that converted wine into nourishment, but even Anders—with his very limited knowledge of elvhen anatomy—doubted it greatly.

‘You can offer me plenty of worse scenarios, but you _cannot_ offer me an alternative response I might have given—one that would be _better_ ,’ Fenris pointed out, sharp talons scraping ever so slightly against the glass.

‘Of course I can!’ Anders said. Belatedly, he remembered to keep his voice down, lest Bodahn hear him shouting at _Master Fenris_ , and die of shock out in the hallway—where he was no doubt lingering even now, eavesdropping on their gestures at conversation. ‘Do you want to hear it? It’s _no._ ‘No, Sebastian.’ ‘No, I have plans all that week; my slave and I are slipping off to _Par Vollen_ to kill some _qunari_ for the summer.’ ‘No. _I decline,_ ’ even, if you want to sound fancy about it.’

Fenris resettled himself against the low couch. He was draped sideways in it, slender, dark legs stretched out ahead of him as he stared up at Anders all too coolly—so much like someone who _hadn’t_ just agreed to fight in an arena massacre. ‘I could not refuse,’ he reasoned, ‘because Sebastian would have suspected something was amiss. You may think him a fool, but he is a dangerous man in this realm. We would do well not to draw further attention to our…situation than we have done already. And he was suspicious of you from the start, because of something _I_ suggested.’

‘Yes, I imagine the sight must have been quite offensive for him,’ Anders snapped, pleased at least to have a logical outlet for his frustrations. He realized he was getting a bit too worked up; and, to make matters even worse, Fenris seemed to have realized it too—if the bemused, green look he was shooting him over the Agreggio was any indication.

‘I’m doing what I can to ensure the safety of our continued existence here,’ Fenris said. His undaunted efforts to be the voice of logic were nothing short of infuriating, and Anders didn’t know how he did it. There was a touch of Justice upon him now, unflagging, undaunted, refusing to alter course despite the flutter of panic Anders brought to the table. But Fenris wasn’t Justice, either, and Anders missed him suddenly, without warning, without light, likely without end. ‘We have no means of guessing how long it will last,’ Fenris continued, unaware of Anders choking on his own breath, the rug pulled out from underneath him at last. ‘This _is_ something I can do. It will give me purpose.’

‘Cutting down archons in the ring will give you purpose?’ Anders asked. It was strange to recognize he could still get angry, although even this fire felt like the pale echoes of the greater inferno he’d once known. That, too, had belonged to someone else before: a strength he’d borrowed, one that had never truly been _his own._ ‘Are you listening to what you’re saying? Sebastian didn’t even tell you how many there are! They’re going to be _powerful blood mages,_ and you’ve just decided to take their lives into your own hands, is that it?’

Fenris cocked his head, lips pausing at the rim of the bottle. ‘Are you…concerned for me? Or do you worry for the lives of these magisters?’

The question caught Anders off-balance, blowing him back like one of Hawke’s powerful force spells. It hadn’t even occurred to him to argue on behalf of the archons, which that meant that—to no small amount of his _own_ private disbelief—he _had_ to be concerned about Fenris, after all. There was no other conclusion that could be drawn, despite Anders’s desperate desire to find one.

The sheer _nonsense_ of it made his head ache.

That wasn’t all that ached. Beneath his crumbling reason, _something_ had taken shape, something Anders could no longer deny. If anything happened to Fenris, then Anders would at last be completely alone. There was no Justice any longer, no maddening voice in his head to bolster and chide, and nothing to shore himself against in troubling times. Anders had no way of knowing whether they’d killed him or merely exorcised the spirit; he was never waiting in the Fade now when Anders drifted off to sleep, but was he gone or hiding, or simply no longer interested?

That was all there was to it, really: stark selfishness was Anders’s most compelling motivation at the best of times, his only port in a life-long storm.

Anders didn’t want Fenris to die. He’d be alone if Fenris left him.

Anders’s fingers curled into fists, twin, empty clenches of muscle and tiny joints and bone at his sides. He bowed his head, and lost control of a little gasp. He wasn’t weeping—wasn’t mourning the loss of a friend, a companion, a brother in arms. He was grieving for himself, what was left and not what wasn’t, and it came out dry and barren as the rest of him, nothing more and nothing less than a sorrowed gasp.

Then, it was over. Perhaps he needed more, but that was all he had. Anders lifted his head to find Fenris neither watching nor looking elsewhere; whether he acknowledged the action for what it was or saw only the basest cause of the panic, Anders supposed he’d never know for certain.

He knew his eyes were red; he relaxed the fingers of one hand, passing them over his brow, scrubbing at the dark shadows beneath. There was no way to heal _this_ , no simple trick of arcane warmth to ease sundered flesh into pale scars, and Anders stared into the palm of his hand for a time, its aimless, wrinkled life-lines, until his breathing eased, and he remembered what it was they were _really_ talking about.

‘I just _believe,_ ’ he said, speaking rapidly now in an attempt to retain the tattered shreds of his dignity, ‘that you might have thought this through a little better. A little more. Or even thought it through _at all_. It’s a dangerous plan, Fenris.’

‘And I, too, am dangerous.’ Fenris drew himself up off the couch, eyes trained on Anders’s face. Anders felt rooted to the floor by the sound of his voice. Perhaps he’d sensed some of Anders’s discomfort, his grief, and was speaking now to distract him from it. It was an unlikely kindness, considering the source, but—as Anders was beginning to realize—there was more to Fenris than tearing the hearts out of men and snarling at his friends. ‘These are _not_ your mages—those oppressed you sought to free from the burden of their chains. These are magisters of the Imperium, _slavers_ and blood mages. If I did not agree to this, then someone else would. If _no_ one else agreed, then they would be left to rot in their collars, made into slaves by their conquerors. _That_ is the world I helped to build, mage. At least…here. I intend to take responsibility for my actions.’

 _But it wasn’t you,_ Anders thought, the words never leaving his mouth. It was an excuse, and a personal one at that. What he really meant was: _But it wasn’t me,_ some attempt for them both to escape culpability, even though it was clearly long past the proper point for that.

Cursed with an affluence of nervous energy, Anders chose not to pace the length of the floor— _like Fenris_ —and sat instead on the edge of the bed, across from Fenris’s couch, where Fenris continued to watch him, over a pull of the wine bottle and a bob of his throat as he swallowed.

Once again: very clever. Anders guessed it might have been easier to accept everything while suffering, or enjoying, inebriation. He cringed, waiting to be scolded; once again, despite everything, he was disappointed when he wasn’t.

‘May I have some of that?’ he asked at last. ‘I think… I rather need it.’

For a moment, he wondered if Fenris was about to tell him ‘no.’ It absolutely seemed like it.

Then, unexpectedly, Fenris acquiesced, gesturing with far more reluctance than Anders had ever seen him display, with far more personal investment, at least in terms of ownership. He’d certainly seen Fenris being _intense_ before—that was par for the course—but it was never about an item in his hands, rather more about the concept, or the presence of an individual who’d harmed him in the past.

And there’d been so many.

It was as though he wasn’t used to the idea of owning anything. And neither was Anders, really, only he’d reacted to that state of affairs by getting _very_ particular about what little he knew was his. So in the end, it wasn’t so much that they’d had different experiences, after all, but rather a matter of how—as people—they’d chosen to react to them.

Carefully, almost daintily, Anders picked himself up again, and crossed the floor, and leaned against the head of the couch, far enough away from Fenris that he _wasn’t_ draped all over him, as Sebastian had appeared to enjoy. He took the bottle, without the same flair for it that Fenris had, and drank, and felt himself make a dreadful face when the heat burned all the way down the back of his throat. It was far too rich for him, far too heady for a man who hadn’t been indulged this way in far too many years.

‘It isn’t anything like good Fereldan ale,’ Anders said, then chuckled. ‘ _Good._ What a gross misappropriation of _that_ word, let me tell you.’

‘Exactly,’ Fenris agreed.

Anders returned the bottle to him, watching him drink. He tried to find a tell, the way Varric always told him to, but it proved impossible. Of course. ‘Was…that a bit of a joke?’

‘It was a bit of the truth,’ Fenris replied simply.

‘You know, Fenris,’ Anders told him, ‘at some point, eventually, you’re going to have to understand that the truth isn’t everything.’

‘I will try to keep that advice in mind,’ Fenris replied, though clearly, he didn’t mean it.

*

It was unfair—just one of many unfair things Anders found himself confronted with on a daily basis—that Fenris refused to be as nervous about the trials as Anders was. And he was the one meant to be fighting. In comparison, Anders’s bystander sympathy—and bystander panic—almost seemed unnecessary.

Almost.

For one thing, Fenris insisted on _calling_ them the trials, rather than _bloody battles to the death in single combat_ , which was a far more accurate description. Considering his obsession with the truth, and with always telling it, Anders was surprised to discover Fenris didn’t extend that motto as far as classifying things—not beyond what other people already called them, in order to appear slightly less gruesome.

Together, they polished off three bottles of the Agreggio; despite Anders’s curiosity, his desire to be experimental, Fenris refused to touch any of the other expensive vintages in the cellar. And Bodahn, bless his soul, kept the drinks coming.

But Anders hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast; by the time their third bottle was empty and the sun was setting just beyond the window, Anders recognized he was quite drunk, and he’d been quite drunk since at least an hour ago.

He leaned his cheek against the sill, peering out into the street below. He didn’t particularly want anyone to catch sight of him from all the way down there; he had no way of determining who knew he was living in this place, what admiring fans, what murderous enemies, and Fenris’s reputation as a brutal master was already beginning to suffer because of their eccentric behavior.

All Anders could see, from his vantage point, were the tiled rooftops of neighboring summer pavilions, all of them very beautiful, and also blurring together whenever he tried to focus on one of them in particular.

‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ Anders asked, pulling away from the window, feeling suddenly urgent. He made his unsteady way to Fenris by the couch—who hadn’t moved the entire time, unless one counted the bend of his elbow and the tip of his head, the bobbing of his throat as he drank. Anders didn’t count it, because it suited him not to.

‘A great many things bother me,’ Fenris replied, with a bit of a personal invective hidden in the words somewhere. Anders suspected, at that moment—and at every moment, really—he was included amongst that vast number, and ranked rather high upon the list, at that.

Then, he corrected himself, maybe he was being selfish to think he even mattered as much as all that. The thought made him feel lonely—or rather, lonelier than ever.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Anders said.

Fenris nodded, barely noticeable. ‘It is, however, what you said.’

Anders pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. That usually brought order to his scattered thoughts, however few of them he’d managed to hold onto since the ritual. ‘All this,’ he explained. ‘Whether or not we’re here for a reason, or if something this stupendously bizarre can actually be nothing more than _totally random_.’

‘I do not think of it,’ Fenris replied. Simple. Uncomplicated. Incomprehensible. Anders wished he had even an ounce of that same certainty, remembering what it was like to be so _convinced_ of anything at all.

‘Wonderful,’ Anders said, flopping over onto the couch. He took less care to give Fenris his space this time, although Fenris didn’t shrink further away. ‘What if we’re stuck here forever—do you think about _that?_ ’

Fenris paused, sparing a sidelong took for Anders’s arm, and the way he’d thrown it haphazardly across the back of the couch. ‘Do I think about whether my _escape_ and subsequent years of freedom have all led me straight back to Minrathous again? Is _that_ what you mean to ask me?’

‘No, you’re right,’ Anders agreed. He was floating carelessly like a bubble on a brook, tossed here and there by the uncaring current. At any moment, he might pop. ‘Too depressing. Next question, Anders.’ He sighed, poking his thumb through a threadbare hole in his sleeve. ‘I’m sure I’ll think of a good one eventually.’

Fenris tapped his armored index finger against the swell of the bottle, _tink tink tink_ , in the growing dark of the room. ‘I do not believe that there can be a greater purpose for everything,’ he admitted, turning his head just slightly instead of staring at the opposite wall. They were almost, _almost_ , actually looking at each other. ‘I have…tried. There must be _something_ worse than this life in the next, but…thinking about whether ‘all this,’ as you say, is meaningless—whether the Maker looks down and keeps tallies for every man’s actions in some cosmic tome… It all seems rather pointless to me. Knowing it won’t change anything, and even if you’re lucky enough to blunder across the answer, you’ll never know for certain.’

Anders fought to keep from staring, and also to keep from imagining the dark, gaping maw of the Void opening under his feet as Fenris spoke. Apparently, the reason Fenris never said much was because once he started, he never stopped—and Anders had somehow managed to strike up a conversation with the one person even _more_ depressing than Justice.

He smiled, almost fondly, and closed his eyes.

Hawke had always said Fenris could be chatty, especially when drinking. Anders had just assumed that was another of his jokes.

‘I want to go to bed,’ Anders announced, making no actual move to do so under his own power. ‘I’ve decided: I want to _sleep,_ very deeply, and when I wake up, I want to be in my own bedroll between Isabela and Varric, and neither of them will be trying to kiss the other, or eating food off of body parts. Doesn’t that sound lovely?’

Fenris snorted inelegantly. It was then that Anders realized he was also drunk, or at least as drunk as someone like Fenris ever got. Faintly inebriated. _Buzzed._ ‘Dream as much as you like, mage. Some of us prefer to live in the real world.’

But this _wasn’t_ the real world, and Anders couldn’t accept it as easily as Fenris could. His problem wasn’t failing to grasp his reality, but rather that he grasped it all too well. And _he_ wasn’t even the one who’d sold himself into playing executioner for Sebastian Vael, Prince of Sitting Too Close and Displaying Terrible Social Etiquette.

Softly, for no discernible reason that Anders could tell, Fenris began to glow. It was more convenient than lighting a wick on the oil lamp, which would have required crossing the full length of the room, but all the same, the sight of it made Anders nervous and painfully nostalgic.

‘You’re doing that thing you do,’ he announced, attempting to sound as though it was all very droll and cheerful. ‘Glowing. You aren’t…I don’t know, thinking incredibly angry thoughts, are you? Not preparing for the trials in advance?’

Fenris gave him a blank look with his disturbingly large elvhen eyes. ‘The sun’s down. My feelings on the dark are no more appreciative than yours, and it’s too hot to light a fire.’

This time, Anders made no attempt to hide the fact that he was staring. Fenris had remembered something he’d said? Fenris had remembered something he’d said _and_ taken it into consideration, _and_ done something about it?

Somehow, Anders found this more difficult to accept than Hawke with slaves, or Isabela without a ship. Perhaps it was contrary of him, but a man had his limits, and _this_ was Anders’s.

‘…Right,’ he said, feeling the incongruity of the words even before he said them, tongue numb on expensive Tevinter wine. ‘Thank you, Fenris.’

Fenris, leaning close enough in the dark that the upper spiked edge of his pauldron brushed against Anders’s palm, reeled away at the sound, having managed to stumble accidentally into a scenario that was too rich even for _his_ blood.

That was fine. Anders had a wealth of experience when it came to extracting himself from situations that grew uncomfortable in little more than an instant. He hoisted himself to his feet, feeling the world sway unsteadily beneath him, the entire house suddenly tipped down a sharp slant.

It felt _so_ bloody good to be properly, rip-roaring drunk again. How had he ever allowed Justice to keep it from him for this long?

 _Because it was easier_ , he reminded himself. Because, in some ways, it had been what he wanted, someone else to do all the difficult thinking, to turn his desires into at least an approximation of reality.

Anders shed his coat and slipped free of his boots, colliding with the bed more than making the conscious choice to sit down on it. In the distance, from somewhere behind him, Fenris _tsked_ softly. That was all right. Anders was used to the judgment and derision of others. Used to the judgment and derision of this _specific_ other, in fact, although he wasn’t normally so subdued about it.

Refusing to think on it any further, Anders slid beneath the covers, Fenris pulsing with pale lyrium light somewhere in the distance.

*

In the morning, a few of the holes in Anders’s coat had been mended; he noticed it only because his fingers didn’t push right out the elbow before making it all the way through the sleeve.

‘It’s spooky,’ Anders said, twisting in front of the floor length mirror.

‘ _Spooky_ ,’ Fenris repeated—which really, Anders should have expected—without looking his way.

‘To think Bodahn was in here during the night, _mending_ things,’ Anders explained. He could have looked better; he could also have looked worse. His stubble, however, was starting to approximate a beard, but he didn’t think it appropriate, or sensible—or even possible, what with the way his hands were shaking—to choose this of all mornings to shave.

‘I see,’ Fenris told him.

Anders wondered if there was anything that truly unsettled him. There were things that made him lose his temper, of course; there were things that made him glow. There were also moments when he paused before a familiar room, haunted by relentless memory. But as much as he could say a thing, that he hated the darkness the same as anyone else with a reason to hate it, it was impossible to imagine him being scared of anything—especially not when he was checking the straps of his armor, tightening a greave over one forearm, twisting the leather and metal buckles neatly against muscle and skin.

Anders moved back and forth between him and the mirror. There was nothing he could do now, even less he’d be able to do later, and yet he felt somehow responsible; he was certain Fenris would soon grow weary of the distraction, and say something, and its purposefulness would allow Anders to sit down, take a few deep breaths, and stop thinking about how bad things were about to get.

‘Is that what you’re really going to fight in?’ Anders asked, when he couldn’t take the silence any longer, the creak of leather, the sound of Fenris unsheathing his sword. He looked upon the Blade of Mercy with distaste—Anders paused to ask himself if they could possibly be thinking the same thing, about the irony or the hypocrisy or the bad humor in _mercy_ as a word choice—then tested its weight with both hands, accustoming himself to the grip.

‘It _is_ what I always fight in,’ Fenris pointed out.

The statement refused all continued conversation.

They were both simply trying to avoid what came next: in other words, the collar, which Anders needed for so public a display, and the sense of helplessness the collar would bring with it, the silence of his magic, the quieting roar to nothing stronger than a distant hum. No louder, no more meaningful, than a cheerful Warden attempting to lighten the darkness of the Deep Roads with a familiar tune.

Once that collar was on, Anders wouldn’t be able to do anything in the arena to help anyone—which was exactly why the collar _needed_ to be on, after all, even if no one realized who Anders would be helping, the side he might be on.

Anders stuffed the damn thing full of cloth again, preparing for another day of sweat and discomfort, as though those feelings were even remotely as important as the helplessness that surrounded them. They _were_ distracting, but never distracting _enough_ , and Anders felt his throat close off when Fenris helped him fasten the final lock, the one in the back, resting high above his shoulder-blades.

‘It is done,’ Fenris said, as though Anders couldn’t already tell.

‘Anything I can, ah, do?’ Anders asked, clenching and unclenching his fists. The thought of the crowds of people, the roar of their entertainment, the press of their bodies—everyone looking at him, and knowing who he was, and thinking that he’d failed—overwhelmed him, dizzying, before he managed to breathe despite everything.

‘No,’ Fenris said, one word that encompassed everything. His favorite.

Anders hoped it wasn’t the last time he’d get a chance to say it.

‘All right then,’ he murmured, and once Fenris had the chain wrapped around his wrist they were ready. Or one of them was, at least.

*

Tevinter was the life-blood of childhood imagination at the Circle; Anders wasn’t ever surprised to see the crease-marks and the finger-smudges on the old tomes with all the pictures, as countless mages, from mere apprentices all the way to the First Enchanter, sat before those volumes, dreaming of what might have been, if only they’d been born somewhere closer to the Hundred Pillars.

This was a bastardization of that concept, the whole thing turned on its head—the other side of justice, if Anders was feeling particularly meaningful. And he was, these days. But there was still something to be said for the raw magnificence of the amphitheater, the legendary Imperium coliseum. Anders had seen it once before, in miniature, hardly so old looking, nothing close to this impressive, and he wanted to say as much to Fenris—before he imagined Fenris’s reply, that _he’d_ seen it before, too, countless times, too young to fight for his life within the ring, but then, he’d done all that anyway. It was grim, a necessary reminder of everything Anders tried so hard to forget all the time, and he said nothing after all. Instead, he followed Fenris through the predictable throngs of blood-thirsty spectators, what happened when _people_ and _justice_ were put so close together.

‘I see you brought Anders with you,’ Sebastian said when they met, crowds clearing out around him and his retinue. ‘An…intriguing choice. To make him watch, I presume?’

‘You presume,’ Fenris agreed.

Sebastian seemed to appreciate this, despite the fact that it didn’t mean anything at all. Anders followed as Fenris beckoned, rather than tugged at the chain, and the whole place swallowed him up, templars and mages and freed slaves, beneath the crumbling arches overhead.

They climbed the roughly-cut stone stairs to a private box that offered a perfect view of the dead center of the ring. _Sebastian’s_ box, from the way he was behaving; Anders couldn’t tell whether it was official, or whether he merely exuded the illusion of ownership with the same smug look of _benevolence_ on his face no matter where he was, Tevinter or Starkhaven or anywhere along the march between.

‘I’d offer you a seat of your own, but you’ll be heading below to prepare, no doubt,’ Sebastian said, instead offering a distracted wave toward a few patrons in the lower seats. ‘You can leave Anders with me, if you like. He couldn’t ask for a better view of the action, and I can personally guarantee he _won’t_ escape.’

A lazy trickle of alarm ran down Anders’s spine, mimicking the sweat that had already begun to seep through the cloth stuffed around his collar. There were Starkhaven guards posted at both the entrance and exits leading to the stairs, the polished white armor that marked them as Sebastian’s men gleaming in the sun; Anders was disappointed to note that none of _them_ had Andraste’s face shoved into their crotch, or anywhere else inappropriate, for that matter. They were depressingly stern-faced, one fingering the pommel of his sword as though he mistakenly imagined _himself_ to be the man fighting in the ring today.

Fenris said nothing. It crossed Anders’s mind that _perhaps_ they were thinking along the same lines once more—that neither of them was particularly keen to be separated from the other at this juncture, although it seemed odd that Fenris would take issue with _that_ , rather than being mere moments away from fighting for his life against the magisters he’d once risked everything to escape.

What Fenris called _closure,_ Anders called complete scrambled-egg-brained _lunacy._

‘Hn,’ Fenris said, then started forward with the smallest of glances over his shoulder, warning Anders to follow so he wouldn’t be forced to tug at the chain. There was a metal ring fixed to the wall, and Fenris slid the bracelet from his wrist, locking Anders in place next to his very own seat. The chain was long enough that he’d be able to sit comfortably—and that was about all the good Anders could come up with for being _chained to a wall_.

He wondered, idly, the thought buzzing through his head like a fat summer fly, what Fenris had preferred when he was a slave—being chained to a wall, or being chained to a person.

But it seemed too personal. Anders bowed his head rather than let Fenris see the look on his face.

Sebastian, fortunately, didn’t seem to think much of their little display, though he did chuckle. ‘I forgot how _ornery_ you get before a match, Fenris. Do as you like, then. But hadn’t you better make ready?’

‘Are you _really_ telling Fenris how to prepare for a match?’ Hawke asked, hoisting himself past the leftmost Starkhaven guard and offering them a cheeky salute. He threw himself onto a bench in the row behind Anders, putting his feet up on the seat in front of him, nearly kicking Anders in the head. ‘Seems a little presumptuous, don’t you think? He _is_ the best. That’s why you specifically requested him.’

‘Yes, well.’ Sebastian smoothed his hair down at the back to hide his irritation at the sudden arrival. ‘He’ll be the _latest_ if he doesn’t hurry. I wasn’t aware you could…afford these seats, Hawke.’

‘I have connections,’ Hawke explained, smiling brightly. He looked around until he’d caught Fenris’s eye, then nodded. ‘Knock ‘em dead out there today.’

‘That _is_ the only option,’ Fenris said, moving away from Anders at last. Embarrassingly, it took nearly all of Anders’s self control to hold perfectly still and pretend he wasn’t about to lean after him. No doubt Hawke and Sebastian would find that _very_ amusing—an abused pet who still longed for his master’s touch. When Fenris paused at the top of the stairs, Anders kept his eyes fixed on the empty arena. ‘…I will return.’

‘You’d better,’ Hawke muttered under his breath.

Privately, Anders could only agree with that sentiment. If Fenris allowed himself to die and left him to the tender mercies of a world not their own, Anders would find it unforgiveable.

And there were other reasons too, of course. More serious reasons. Anders tried not to think about them.

Nearly immediately after Fenris had left—his soundless, bootless footsteps swallowed up in the bustle of the crowd—Sebastian leaned back in his seat with an audible _clank_ of armor.

‘I think you’ll enjoy this, Hawke,’ he commented, the sort of person who found the quiet unbearable without the sound of his own voice to fill it. ‘I’ve prepared a rather…interesting surprise for our first trial.’

Anders had no idea what that was supposed to signify—although based on what little context he had, what prejudices he still held, _precious Anders_ and _true justice_ and all, he’d already decided it couldn’t mean anything good.

‘How delightful,’ Hawke said, but there was something hard beneath his casual tone.

All at once, on some unseen signal, the noise in the crowd dimmed. Anders leaned forward, wincing at the pull of metal against flesh, but not letting it stop him; below, Fenris stalked toward the center of the ring, a dark and sinewy spider against the white sand. There was no sign of his opponent yet, and they weren’t close enough for Anders to parse the expression on Fenris’s face—which was never all that clear to begin with, anyway. From across the ring, a man in templar robes and armor barked a command.

The heavy portcullis on the other side of the arena rose with a screech of metal scraping metal. A collar-less magister stepped into the arena—tall, bearded, and sallow.

Anders had trouble lately piecing together what he remembered and what Justice remembered, what their memories were together, as opposed to what had been nothing more than fitful dreams. The recognition came first— _I know this person_ , a vague sense of uncertainty; he had to follow it up by scrambling through an assortment of faded faces and muffled voices, piecing each detail together more slowly than he liked to admit. He knew this magister, and at first he didn’t know why; then, he found the right setting, the right tone, the proper memory, to make all the elements fit, with a continuity, and, finally, a name.

‘Danarius,’ Hawke said from behind him. Anders heard the creak of leather as he sat forward, his feet dropping heavily to the ground.

 _Danarius._ Yes; that was it. _Danarius’s summer pavilion._ Anders remembered the man; he also remembered helping to kill him. It was and it wasn’t like seeing a ghost; there had been enough of those in Anders’s lifetime, real ones, that he knew what they were really like, and they were far more intangible, less prone to appearing in broad daylight. He shivered anyway.

Details—important, solid, grounding details—were all wrong in this place. It was hard enough to understand them as they were supposed to be, impossible once they’d been shaken up. Anders’s hands closed over the railing before him; words, which were all he had left, finally abandoned him for good.

The only person he wanted to speak to wasn’t there, anyway. He was down in the ring, not even glowing, his back toward Anders—who, out of everyone else in this entire world, actually knew him.

‘Sebastian,’ Hawke said, ‘did I ever tell you you’re something of a bastard?’

Sebastian tutted faintly; he, too, had leaned forward, with the same keen interest as the rest. Anders wanted, very badly, to make him suck on a fireball. _Choke_ on it, perhaps. Make Andraste choke on it, while he was at it. But there was nothing he could do, magic straining at its bonds but getting nowhere at all.

‘Now, now, Hawke,’ Sebastian said. ‘It was a gift. You don’t know Fenris the way I do. Trust me: I _think_ he’ll like it.’

The absurdity of that perspective clearly went without comment. It had taken, Anders recalled, four of them—Anders, Fenris, Hawke, and the Sebastian they’d known, insufferable at times, preachy, shallow, childish, but never like this—to defeat the man who was squared off against Fenris now, Fenris alone. _And_ they’d been prepared for him. Well—Hawke had been prepared for him, anyway.

Not Fenris. Not here.

It must have been obvious—by which Anders meant painful, and humiliating—to run from someone all your life, only to let them get the drop on you. Twice. Anders didn’t presume to know Fenris the way he probably knew himself, every inch of killing muscle at work and in repose, but as far as gifts went, he was certain Fenris would have preferred a bottle of Agreggio.

The chain clanked. Anders realized he was trembling.

‘Silence, slave,’ Sebastian suggested.

Justice would have known what to do. Yes, that was true. But _Justice would have saved the mage._

Anders tried to lean forward over the railing, then jerked backward as the chain went taut, holding him firmly in place.

 _Turn around_ , Anders thought. He tried to will Fenris to do something, to begin, to start off with the hand-through-the-chest thing while Danarius was still contemplating the gravity of Sebastian’s little surprise. One of them had to get back on his feet; somebody had to begin _sometime_. The crowd had grown restless, and this was the worst thing that could have possibly happened—the worst thing until the _next_ worst thing, which was Danarius’s first spell, cast in a shower of blood.

For an old man, he certainly was fast. Then again, this _was_ the Tevinter Imperium. Fenris was right about one thing—these weren’t _Anders’s_ mages.

Anders hissed a breath of warning, nothing Fenris could hear, nothing that made him feel better or useful or anything more present in the moment than a piece of furniture. Shades, three of them, sprung from the ground, and the answering vitriol from the crowd said everything Anders’s needed to know about whose side they were on—what those shades were, or rather, what they represented.

Still, Fenris didn’t move. It was one of those moments—far more protracted than usual—that found him somewhere other than the present, a dangerous quality for a man of action. Or an elf of action. Or _anyone_ in Thedas, these days. The shades moved quickly; they were on him in an instant.

Then, the glittering arc of Fenris’s Blade of Mercy came up, and Anders let out a sigh of relief, a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, sagging forward in his seat.

Behind him, he heard Hawke engage in a similar action.

Sebastian banged his fist against his thigh. Andraste’s pale face gleamed in the mid-day sunlight.

A hot line of sweat dripped down Anders’s cheek, from his temple to his jaw. Fenris burst into action with the desperation of a cornered animal, a beast from the Kocari Wilds driven mad by the taint. The shades tore over his blades like shadows, then split like dried tar, trying to reform, melting back into the ground below.

Some distance away now, Anders saw the bright flare of a true arcane shield going up, Danarius taking himself out of range as three more shades burst forth from the ground; they streaked at Fenris like dark fish through deep water as he grappled with the remaining survivor from the first wave. Lyrium pulsed through his skin, and the crowd let out a roar of approval as not _only_ the tattoos, but Fenris’s entire body blazed with blue light.

Sebastian whistled his approval. ‘See, Hawke? He never enjoys himself unless it’s a real challenge.’

Anders decided to ignore the commentary. His entire focus narrowed to Fenris’s glowing form, the light in his skin so bright that it was almost painful to look at, like staring directly at the sun. Anders had fought at his side countless times, but his own concentration had always been on their enemies, dealing his fair share of damage in order to keep up with the group, his other instincts focused on who needed healing most, and not who _shone_ the brightest.

Fenris cut a horizontal stroke through the shades, then lunged forward as they struck out at him with dark, malformed arms. His speed and skill with the Blade of Mercy meant that he still had the upper hand, but Danarius was safe behind his barrier now, and seemed content enough to summon _more_ shades to do his bidding from that advantageous position. They spewed forth from the ground like Merrill’s thorny vines, another blood spell that had made Anders quake with rage even as he recognized, and feared, its power.

A one-on-one battle with a Tevinter magister would have been one thing, but this was rapidly becoming a melee. Anders knew that Fenris was capable of handling himself, but he also recalled—many years back, in the distant haze of his tangled memories—the impassioned plea Fenris had made for help, the conviction in his eyes when he’d claimed he could _not_ defeat Danarius alone. And perhaps it was a request not _solely_ based upon his prowess, or his powers.

Anders’s throat felt tight beneath the collar, as if the cloth he’d stuffed between metal and skin was serving only to strangle him. Something burst into flames at the corner of the ring and Anders turned, no longer possessed of the ability to appear _disinterested._ He knew what they were before they crystallized in his sight— _rage demons,_ simmering and spitting sulfur, vanishing just as quickly as they’d appeared.

Oblivious to this new threat, Fenris was still battling the shades at the center of the ring. Every time he sliced through one advance, leaving a dark mess of decay in his wake, he shot forward again with renewed vigor, blade glancing off the bright bubble Danarius had erected for protection. The crowd howled its disapproval—for a moment, Anders thought he heard Fenris howling along with them, his voice lean and hungry as the wolf he was named after.

 _Look out,_ Anders thought, with all the force he couldn’t use to speak. _Look out, look out._

As the rage demons broke through the sand like a volcanic eruption, Fenris sprang to one side, with all the agility of someone who’d been both hunter and hunted countless times before. He’d reacted to the rumbling beneath his feet, no doubt—one of the few arguments that could be made for going about with no shoes on, ever.

But he also stumbled before regaining an offensive stance, and Anders wondered whether he’d been burned, whether his timing hadn’t been _quite_ perfect enough for him to escape the assault unscathed. All Anders’s instincts as a healer were screaming, and the maddening whisper of his magic—too far off whenever he reached for it—was wearing Anders down. It was impossible to make out any specific details from this distance, not to mention the lyrium light obscured the chance of seeing any real injuries until Fenris cooled down again.

Whether he was injured or not, Fenris launched himself forward with a shout, springing up and above a flaming claw before he brought his sword downward, one hard, vertical strike that blew both demons back.

Hawke let out a cheer from his seat. Sebastian laughed with pure delight.

Anders dug his fingernails into his palms and wished he wasn’t so firmly on the Maker’s bad side, just so he’d have someone to pray to.

Still, Fenris was holding his own. He’d lost ground against the rage demons, but summoning them seemed to have tired Danarius out; he hadn’t called forth anymore shades, and he didn’t seem the type who wouldn’t go all out, if only he had the blood and the strength left to do it. Anders drew in a shaky breath, ignoring the slink of his chain as he rocked ever so slightly back and forth.

He’d been worried before, but it didn’t come close to how he was feeling now: watching Fenris in the thick of things and being quite literally _tied up,_ with no means to help. They’d fought enemies like this before, but always in a four man—or woman—team. Together. And no one, not even Hawke, was mad enough to take on this sort of battle all by himself.

Fenris struck the last rage demon to the sand with a blow more suitable for slicing clean through a dragon. He paused for a half-second, shaking out his right arm before returning the palm of his hand to the pommel of his sword.

‘Come on,’ Hawke muttered. ‘Drop the barrier, you bastard.’

Anders bit his lip, watching helplessly as Fenris steadied himself for another run at Danarius’s shield. His feet left the ground at a dead run; a cacophony of rattling bone and dark, shambling steps filled the air around the arena.

Skeleton warriors—four, by Anders’s count—rose through the soil with alarming rapidity. All four were archers, distance fighters, the sort Anders and Varric had been tasked with taking out while Hawke and Fenris dealt with the main forces. There was no effective way to battle an archer at close range. Not without getting seriously hurt.

Anders _did_ shout then, a stilted sound that died too early on his lips. He knew he should have been stronger, more restrained, that his distress would please all too many people whose entertainment was the last thing he wanted to provide, but to be perfectly honest, he didn’t care.

Behind him, he felt Hawke’s hand grip the back of his chair; the man was poised and ready to leap over the railing and into the ring at a moment’s notice, even unarmed. But something held him back—nothing so obvious as a chain at all, or a collar. An innate understanding of Fenris’s refusal to accept assistance, perhaps, or something else, something Anders couldn’t hope to appreciate. The two seemed to have known each other for a long time, more than ten years, and Hawke probably hadn’t spent over a fourth of his life working through the daze of spiritual possession, ignoring everything that didn’t relate directly to his cause.

It was all superfluous, anyway. The only people who had the distance to understand—logically—what would happen, the odds five to one, were those who weren’t in the ring. Anders supposed everyone had drawn a breath together, afraid while also slightly eager for a blood bath, but they didn’t matter; Hawke didn’t matter; even Sebastian didn’t matter.

Only Fenris, a streak of white light moving quick as the arrows chasing him, _really mattered._ Anders leaned forward again, and choked, but he didn’t blink, and he didn’t miss it when Fenris charged straight into the volley, tearing the archers down bone by bone, completely oblivious to everything other than the man behind the shield.

Then, the shield flickered.

Anders choked again, for a different reason. Fenris’s sword clashed against the barrier, and when it flickered this time, it was the last; after that, there was nothing but air between Danarius and Fenris’s blade, and then, there was nothing between them at all.

After Danarius fell, so too did what remained of his army of corpses.

Anders’s eyes pricked with the force of staring, unblinking, for so long. But he felt—he _knew_ —that he had to bear witness to this, a personal vengeance, an act that was necessary, but would also never bring Fenris the peace or closure that he’d sought on this battlefield. Fenris was different; he’d never hoped to meet Danarius in the ring, and though every face he saw would have been his old master’s, it _wasn’t_ what it seemed. Anders told himself there was a difference, a fine distinction, all the shades and shadows of revenge, all of them here, in this coliseum.

Fenris tore through Danarius the same way he had the first time, though it was more painful to behold now, more private. Anders recognized all the little twitches and inconsistencies in Fenris’s posture from day to day, that familiar tension, the arch in his back and the stiffness of his shoulders. Even as nothing more than an outline, a shadow made entirely of light, he heard Fenris begin: _There once was an elf, who was taken as a slave…_

Anders tried to shake his head, but the collar stopped him. The crowd’s cheers filtered to him slowly, through a haze, while Fenris did no more and no less than what had been asked of him—killing a man, _this man_ —with an efficiency that was no more brutal than it had to be. _Clean_ , Anders thought, despite the muck and grime, the blistered sand where the rage demons had scorched hot streaks across the ground, and the blood Danarius had spilled, alongside the blood Fenris had spilled for him.

Fenris wheeled back, away from the body where it lay. He took no time to glorify his own actions, or even to acknowledge the audience chanting his name. Sebastian had joined them, with a slow clap, but Fenris seemed beyond them now, still glowing—though that flickered with the same intensity as the arcane shield, a few brief, unpredictable moments while he stood his ground.

When the light went out, it took Fenris’s strength with it.

Arrows, Anders realized; the lyrium glow had obscured how many, and now the elf was a bloody pincushion. He reached instinctively for a healing spell, something ranged, but nothing came to his thwarted fingertips. It was enough to make him grab the chain, and shake it, but the sound was drowned out by the chanting, the communal shout of surprise—as though it was really that shocking—when Fenris dropped to his knees.

He never relinquished his blade.

If nothing else, Anders recognized that dogged insistence, the ability to cling to something long after the fires were out. For all he knew, Fenris didn’t even know the battle was won—after all, he’d killed Danarius once before, and now he was back again from the dead, rising like one of the shades, wearing a familiar face.

It was Hawke who grabbed the end of Anders’s chain, pulling it free from the loop, wrapping it quick, twice, around his forearm.

‘They say you heal—or healed,’ he said, his voice quick, his gaze keen. There was something of the Hawke Anders already knew in the color of his eyes, and for a brief moment, he was able to shift the burden of familiarity—before that, it had rested solely on Fenris’s armored shoulders—to the shock of golden light amidst the deeper brown. ‘You see, I don’t _trust_ leeches and hensbane for real wounds. Come on. Do something to _help_ , for once in your life.’

Anders had no choice, no inclination other than to follow.

*

They took Fenris home together, blowing off congratulations and well-wishes alike. Anders was uncomfortable with Hawke’s proximity, but he found himself nonetheless grateful for his help. Fenris was light enough, but Anders had never been particularly inclined toward _physical labor,_ and he could only imagine the scene they’d cause in the streets: a freed slave and his bloodied master, Anders attempting to carry Fenris _and_ bear the collar at the same time.

Simply put, it wouldn’t have worked.

There were templars everywhere outside the stadium, glittering bright in the late-afternoon sun as they waited for news of the archon’s execution. Anders shivered as he and Hawke slipped through their ranks, their mob-enthusiasm palpable. Even Justice had never condoned blood magic, but a _trial_ —something that should have been about upholding the letter of civilized law—was never intended to inspire this kind of wild fervor, at least not in an ideal world.

Even half a mile away, the roar from the stadium hadn’t yet faded. Anders couldn’t help but picture Sebastian in his private box, still presiding over the court he’d fashioned for himself, still thinking that what he’d done here today was a _gift._

Bodahn ambushed them at the door, having been waiting there for some news all morning. Once they were safely inside, Anders took advantage of Hawke’s distraction while dealing with the dwarf to shoulder more of Fenris’s weight. _Safely_ in this world being a relative term—and Anders didn’t altogether like the fact that he was beginning to think of the summer pavilion as his _home_ , either.

Fenris was heavy against him, blood seeping sticky and warm against Anders’s shoulder. The coat was definitely ruined now—blood was the one stain you couldn’t wash out for anything—and doubly a shame, too, since someone had finally taken the initiative to do a little mending.

Anders took a tentative sidestep away from Hawke and Bodahn. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them—vaguely, in the way that one always instinctively _wished_ to trust a familiar face—but neither of them was the man Anders needed him to be, which meant Anders had to become the man _Fenris_ needed. Or rather, the healer he needed.

There was no telling what secrets he might betray otherwise, slurring and honest from the depths of his consciousness. That Danarius was supposed to be dead already, perhaps. That they’d killed him once before, together, and then, Fenris had killed his own sister.

Somehow, Anders couldn’t imagine Hawke brushing that information off his shoulder as easily as the rest.

Fenris was a poor liar. Anders didn’t want to have to think about the consequences of their situation being revealed at this sensitive juncture.

‘Anders,’ Hawke said, catching him before he could slip free entirely. It was the chain, Anders realized belatedly, foolishly, with a _hurk_ of surprise. That damned thing made it impossible to sneak around anywhere. Hawke followed the path he’d meant to take with sharp eyes, lingering last of all on Fenris himself—Fenris, his breathing shallow, long eyelashes dark against his skin. Anders felt familiar talons tighten upon his arm, then release just as quickly. Hawke came forward, lowering his voice. ‘If this goes wrong… If somehow, miraculously, he ends up _dead_ instead of healed, then I’m holding you personally responsible, do you understand? Don’t take this as your chance to escape, because it isn’t.’ Fenris made a quiet, half-conscious noise in the back of his throat. The furrow in Hawke’s brow grew deeper. ‘I’m guessing you already know this, but you won’t find a better situation than the one you’ve got with him—so _don’t_ screw it up.’

 _Or I’ll send you to Sebastian,_ Anders finished mentally, expecting the final blow to be a threat. When it didn’t come—when Hawke merely ran a hand through his sweat-darkened hair and stared at him hard—Anders realized that he was actually waiting for a reply.

‘I’m a healer,’ Anders said, wincing at the hoarse rasp of his own voice. He’d forgotten his personal discomfort, the collar around his throat, when everything narrowed down to Fenris, and his pain, _his_ wounds. Honestly, it was a relief to have someone to focus on other than himself. Someone to care for. After all, he _was_ a healer. ‘I’ll take care of him.’

‘You’d better,’ Hawke said, turning back to Bodahn. ‘I’ll head off anyone who thinks to come asking about the match down here. Damned fool idea, if you ask me.’

It was as close to an expression of trust that Anders was ever going to get, from anyone in this place.

Sure enough, Hawke slid the chain loose from his forearm, turning his back as Anders hauled Fenris up the stairs. Despite the fact that he was dragging another body, and feats of strength had never been his particular area of expertise, Anders managed to be mercifully swift about it.

It was only once they were in the master bedroom, alone, together, with a locking door between them and the rest of the world, that Anders could really breathe, even with the collar still clasped tight around his neck. He laid out fresh towels on the bed, then attempted to levy Fenris onto it without disturbing his wounds. Fenris’s thin arm was wrapped tight around his shoulders like a drowning man’s, and it was only after Anders had lowered him onto the mattress that Fenris seemed to realize it—like any other promise of solid ground—wasn’t about to vanish immediately out from under him.

Slowly, he let go, warm skin and armor scraping at the back of the collar, snagging on Anders’s hair. He’d regained at least some consciousness now, which was a relief, but also a burden. It would certainly make things more difficult; Anders was just glad to see the focus returning to his eyes again.

Still, it wasn’t an ideal situation. The scant memories he had of trying to heal him in the past were colored with fierce resentment. They’d very nearly come to blows once—or rather, Fenris had, before Justice retaliated, wanting to kill him where he lay, already injured.

But everything was different now. Anders set about unlocking the collar himself, with hands that shook only slightly at the task.

There was one thing he knew, better than himself—whatever he was now, whatever he had been, whatever he was going to be tomorrow or next week or in the odd years he had left in his unruly life. And that one thing was healing, more instinctive than the rest, a truth that couldn’t be denied by anyone. _His magic._ The only constant. It was all he’d had to get him through solitary, for example: little flickers of fire in the darkness, the flame threading through his outstretched fingertips, something to remind him he wasn’t completely on his own. There were other people out there, maybe not exactly like him, but they were suffering, too—and he couldn’t be so grossly selfish as to imagine he was the only one who’d ever been wronged the same way.

Was it any wonder, Anders asked himself, that he’d gone _so_ far in a single attempt to avoid ever having to be alone?

Justice was collateral, really. Because, before everything else, Justice was a friend.

Fenris made a noise on the bed as the collar hit the floor; Anders looked over just in time to see him arch his back, fingers clawing at the sheets. Anders tugged the silk around his throat free and moved to the side of the bed, hands hovering over Fenris’s skin. So close, yet not close enough. There was one last distance to cover, small in theory, but very great in practice. Anders’s fingers twitched, his palms dry, the back of his neck sweaty.

‘I need your permission, Fenris,’ he said. He didn’t know why, exactly; it only seemed important.

Fenris’s mouth, in a hard line, worked around a silent word. His eyes widened, fixed on the ceiling, then squinted, a look Anders recognized. The feverish, the wounded, and the very drunk had that one expression in common: an attempt to resolve what they saw into something they could recognize. They knew they should, and they wanted to very badly, but the desire wasn’t always equal to the success of an endeavor. Anders knew that intimately enough.

‘I can’t—’ Fenris said.

Anders could feel the magic pulse in his fingertips, could see the answering pulse of light from the veins of lyrium along Fenris’s skin. They were struggling to meet somewhere in the middle.

Anders didn’t want to hurt him, remembering all too well the way Fenris shied away from every touch. As though it hurt him—or, at the very least, as though he believed it would hurt him.

And that was the first tenet of any healer: don’t _hurt_ the patient, not anymore than he was hurt already. Anders hadn’t forgotten so much that he didn’t still ascribe to the theory that making things worse, by very definition, hindered the progress of making things _better_

‘Well, you’re just going to have to, I’m afraid,’ Anders told him.

He didn’t touch. He tried not to look. The lyrium swooned toward him, nothing more than a blue-white song on the humid air, but Anders held his ground, waiting, if not entirely patient.

‘Permission granted,’ Fenris muttered at last, from a deep, unhappy place inside his chest, as though the very _words_ were more agonizing than any of the injuries he was currently suffering. Not because he had to, but because he _thought_ he had to.

Anders was tired, so very tired, of people suffering needlessly. And if he had to begin somewhere—if he had to start now, like starting all over again, the same cure from a different angle—then it was possible to begin right here.

But only if he stopped thinking about things, and actually started _doing_ them.

He tried to be efficient, finding all the buckles and straps that comprised each unfamiliar element of Fenris’s armor without touching Fenris’s skin. He was afraid of it; and Fenris, he suspected, was afraid of it, too. The pauldrons came off first, followed by the chestplate, followed by the greaves. Fenris, bare to the waist, shivered, small despite his lean muscles, while Anders tried not to wince at the sharp tips of the pauldron spikes, so unnecessary, so unfriendly, and so utterly unique.

Anders held up his hands. ‘Nothing up my sleeves,’ he promised, with no guarantee Fenris would care, or even that the sound of his voice would be in any way reassuring. Their differences made it impossible to acknowledge their similarities; even if they both abhorred a moment like this one, its implications, its _truths_ , Anders would always be incapacitated by the eternal question mark, knowing there was no way to transpose his needs onto Fenris’s. And perhaps Fenris felt the same way.

There had to be something universal they could both understand—there had to be an answer. What Anders needed, what Fenris needed—there was a moment, with the rush of temperate magic through Anders’s palms, when it seemed like they were one and the same, just opposite sides of a whole, a system of mirror images, of warped reflections.

Then Anders shook his head, still careful not to touch, though the first brush of magic against Fenris’s skin made him hiss a curse. It sounded foreign, possibly Arcanum.

‘Shh,’ Anders said. He couldn’t treat Fenris like any other patient because he wasn’t, and that would be wrong—but some things were necessary. Some things were eternal, like the kindly tut of a healer to ease a man’s pain.

Fenris _tched_ at him in return, still arching his back from the mattress. Anders numbed the chest-wound first, somewhere higher than the heart, underneath the collarbone, knitting muscle to muscle and skin to skin, then moved on to the burn and welt along Fenris’s right flank, between two ribs. There were countless cuts and scratches from the arrows, too, sharp heads that had pierced the armor without burying themselves too deeply in the flesh. Anders healed those next, watching the deep red of the littler wounds disappear beneath seamless new skin. He took care not to leave any scars between the elegant filigree of the tattoos scrolling along Fenris’s chest, the skin pulled taut over his ribcage and the flat expanse of his stomach, twitching and trembling with each new spell.

They truly did cover every inch of him. Anders could even see glowing white lines hook beneath Fenris’s trousers, snaking lower still. Bright light flared from his palms, meeting the lyrium’s flush like a solstice eclipse. And, just like an eclipse, Anders could scarcely bring himself to look at it.

Fenris made a plaintive noise in the back of his throat, shifting restlessly beneath Anders’s hands. Even though there were no more visible wounds, he still didn’t seem comfortable. Anders suspected the magic was to blame, but it had to be more than that.

‘Turn over,’ he suggested, voice light as a feather.

Fenris’s head snapped up so quickly that Anders very nearly, inappropriately, laughed. Somehow, he resisted the urge, resting his hand on the air just above Fenris’s hip, without touching him.

‘There’s clearly something else bothering you,’ Anders explained. He almost didn’t recognize the sound of his own voice, a patience and skill with _reasoning_ he hadn’t displayed in years. One of them had to be reasonable, after all; it felt good to have a role to play again. Not as the figurehead of a cause that had come to mean everything to him, but as a _man._ As Anders.

Even Hawke had managed to balance life as Kirkwall’s Champion with his own private desires, though some days, he’d admitted, it _had_ been a struggle for him.

Fenris scowled and shifted on his elbows, attempting to flip himself over like a fried egg. Anders chewed his lip, biting down hard as his hands hovered near his elbow, his shoulder, his chest—holding back, not giving him the assistance he so obviously needed.

It was a laborious process for both of them, Fenris’s body glowing as he managed to face Anders, just before pitching forward into his lap.

Anders’s first instinct was to shift, to make him more comfortable. Then, over the silvery rise of his tousled head, he could see another narrow gash between the bony blades of Fenris’s shoulders, and a long, dark bruise just beneath that, where he’d been struck not with a blade or a demon’s talon, but something blunter than that—perhaps something like the polished dome of a magister’s staff.

Fenris huffed and clenched his armored fingers against Anders’s thighs, then pushed himself to sit.

He couldn’t manage it without some kind of leverage, though he quickly moved his hands to Anders’s shoulders, not looking him in the face. Instead, his green eyes fixed firmly on the middle distance, worry and discomfort hidden in the softening lines of his usually unforgiving mouth.

‘Everyone gets hurt, you know,’ Anders murmured, scooting a bare inch closer on the bed, trying to stare down Fenris’s back without feeling like he was stealing an embrace or something else equally inappropriate to the gravity of the situation. ‘It isn’t something you have to hide, or something you have to bear alone. That’s why… That’s why people like me exist in the first place. To help all you brave, strong warriors who just don’t know when to quit. Of course, we can’t always do our job when we’re locked away in towers and dungeons, but…’

Fenris’s breath fluttered against Anders’s sweaty neck, chest rising and falling, something that would have been recognizable on anyone else.

Was he _laughing?_

No; he couldn’t be. It was probably just a cough.

‘You are…making a case for mage freedom _now?_ ’ Fenris asked. He hissed as Anders’s fingers found the cut on his back once more, pouring the light of a healing spell across the battered flesh.

‘No,’ Anders whispered, glad enough to talk if it provided an adequate distraction for them both. His downright refusal to do anything but concentrate while being healed was part of what had made him such a difficult patient in the past. If only he understood that these things took time—that it was necessary to pretend other things mattered for a while, in order to overcome the pain, and to start healing. ‘Probably not. I’m not…very _good_ at conversation, when it comes right down to it. People used to say I talk a lot, and right they were, but that’s not _really_ the same thing.’

‘No,’ Fenris agreed. Anders’s fingers brushed his skin, feeling the hard knobs of his spine, and Fenris twitched forward, turning his face against the feathers in Anders’s coat.

If Hawke came in now, there would be no explanation for how this looked. If they were—through some Trickster’s joke—miraculously transported _back_ to their world in the midst of this clinch, there’d be no explaining it to the companions who actually knew them, either. It wouldn’t have made sense to anyone.

Anders couldn’t think about it, giving himself over to the healing force inside him, the one thing that had remained a constant through Grey Warden taint and spiritual possession and now, this fresh insult to possibility. He drew his hand over the raised welt of Fenris’s bruise; Fenris reacted to even the barest ghost of a touch, but he didn’t try and fight his way free of Anders’s hold. Instead, he huddled closer to Anders’s chest, as though trying to hide himself from the flutter of magic at his back.

‘Shh,’ Anders said again. ‘Try…thinking of something else.’

‘What else is there to think of?’ Fenris asked.

And that was really how he saw it—unlike Anders, who had too many things to think about at any given time, although all of it amounted to the same thing.

 _Nothing_

Anders smiled sadly, thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘How about…how much you hate fish, or what it might be like to wear boots. Or that one time Hawke’s dog beat you at cards and you very nearly had a fit.’

‘Mabari,’ Fenris corrected. ‘Not a dog.’

‘ _Mabari_ , then.’ Anders filled his voice with amusement the same way he filled his fingertips with magic. ‘Can’t stand the idea of being bested by an animal, is that it?’

‘Mabari are…clever,’ Fenris replied, an inarguable defense.

It was all the time Anders had needed—the healing was over. The bruise eased, the color fading, the swelling down, just the barest of shadows where the wound had been. Anders was tired, but it felt good, as though somehow he could heal himself by healing others—just not in a noticeable way. Something beneath the skin, beneath the bone and muscle, beyond the flesh entirely.

He’d been waiting to do it this the whole time. Not being able to, then giving in to instinct at last, had a way of bringing sharp immediacy to relief; it began in his chest, just a little point of light, then flooded outward through his body, a bit of healing magic all its own.

It was over, but Anders made no move to leave. His hands hovered somewhere over Fenris’s shoulders, fingertips barely touching the space between his tattoos—more like scars, from this angle, raised like a network of gooseflesh, Fenris’s skin literally _always_ prickling and crawling. No wonder he felt so uncomfortable; no wonder he was always on the move, as though the very act might someday let him outrun his own body.

Justice, too, had always been moving, pacing, flickering on and off, never _gone_ , always just one more shade of intensity. Higher or lower, there was always the promise of more, so it didn’t really matter which. Anders knew what it was like to be in a constant state of motion, knew what it was like to want and fear a touch capable of slowing him down. What would happen, if he lost that necessary equilibrium?

 _This_ , he supposed. Whatever state he was in right now. Still, off-balance, incredibly alone, his arms vaguely mapping the shape of Fenris’s body in the air _around_ his body, but not yet coming down to hold him. Either it was for the best, or it wasn’t. The odds were precisely even.

Sometimes, a healer had to risk an unexpected cure. The burden of making those decisions for himself was never something Anders had suffered willingly, but he felt Fenris’s breath skirting hot across the raw skin of his throat, his hair tickling against a bruise, his brow pressed into the bloodied feathers as he leaned in close. He was small, smaller than Anders had ever imagined, though light played off tight muscle along the strong breadth of his back, reminding Anders that he was _not_ as small as he probably felt, even in this particular moment.

Only holding him would be enough.

Of course, it also ran the risk of being too much. But Anders took that risk, fingertips coming down against bare hints of skin, sort of— _sort of_ —like the puzzle he’d been toying with all this time, fitting his fingers along Fenris’s shoulders, avoiding the lyrium as best he could while he went. Fenris shivered, a full-bodied, guttural _thing_ that took over him completely, rolling all the way up his spine. His breathing hitched; Anders heard it in his chest, then felt it against the pulse at his neck.

‘Mage,’ Fenris said.

Anders closed his eyes. ‘Hm?’

It took Fenris a while longer to come up with something else—as though the word itself was question enough. Finally, he spoke, ragged, the words catching on something deep in his chest. ‘…What are you doing?’

‘I’m being a healer,’ Anders told him.

It was a damn sight more than salves and poultices, spells and glyphs. It was a calling, not _the_ Calling, a truth that didn’t mark the end of something but rather the beginning of it. Potential, possibility, and the comfort in both—the promise of feeling better when all you’d ever known was how to feel worse.

‘That much was clear,’ Fenris replied at last, but there was a curiosity in his voice that lingered, just beneath the obvious.

‘You’d think that, but actually, it isn’t as straightforward as everyone seems to believe.’ Anders waited; after a terribly long pause, Fenris knotted his fingers in the fabric at the small of Anders’s back. Belatedly, Anders realized he hadn’t taken off those gloves; their sharp talons would tear the coat to pieces. But that coat was ruined anyway. A little shiver, the cool press of metal, shot through Anders’s gut. ‘In fact, I like to think not _everyone_ can do it.’

‘Yes,’ Fenris agreed. ‘You _would_ like to think that.’

Anders forgave him. He was hurt, cornered; it had been an ambush, if anything, and now a mage was the only person he could trust, the only person he needed. How awful it must have been. How surprising. How incredible—not necessarily in the finer sense of the word, but rather the awful sense—but Anders needed to change that. He rested his cheek against Fenris’s bare shoulder, and Fenris’s fingers seized around a handful of cloth, finger-guards spasming against the body just beneath.

‘Mage,’ Fenris repeated.

‘I already told you,’ Anders said. ‘ _I’m being a healer._ ’

Fenris exhaled in a huff, body tense with the promise of movement that never quite realized its full potential. Anders’s cheek bristled against the warm, sticky skin of his shoulder, waiting for Fenris to hiss and lunge away—to make it obvious somehow how little he accepted this comfort.

Instead, Fenris spread his hand deliberately, fingers flexing as he pressed his palm to the small of Anders’s back, through the ruined, tortured cloth.

‘This is not…’ he began, then halted, the fingers of his left hand climbing between them, claws hooking into the front of Anders’s coat just the way Ser Pounce-a-lot’s always had, on the rare occasions Anders saw fit to free him from his robes. The cool curve of steel knuckles slid up his throat to his chin, and Anders lifted his head with the beckoning touch. Fenris stared him down, something intangible flickering in his eyes, warmth hidden beneath a cool suspicion. He swallowed, and Anders watched the ripple of his tattoos over his neck. ‘This is _not_ magic.’

‘It is,’ Anders murmured, bright buds of desperation blooming and dying in his chest with the quickening beat of his heart. Fenris didn’t understand—perhaps had never _wished_ to understand—that there were different kinds of magic in the world. There were different kinds of wounds, too, and some that never hoped to be treated. They couldn’t be seen, so it often felt tempting to ignore them entirely, but the trouble _grew_ like rot at the center of a good apple, until one day it ate through everything.

Anders had been so lonely once that he’d allowed himself to become an abomination. There were other reasons for the decision, _good_ reasons; he knew that he’d done good for mages everywhere with Justice on his side. But it hadn’t always been about that, not on its own.

He’d never have agreed to give his body over to another host if he’d ever known what it was to feel _complete_ already.

Fenris, he suspected, suffered from something of the same disease. Not one that led someone to spiritual possession, but one that came from sleeping endless nights in a windowless room, bearing a collar with no hope of respite, never knowing a kind face, or what it was to call a place _home._

Fenris _tsked_ , then moved before Anders could react, pushing him down against the bed on his back. Once again, surprise outweighed size, and Anders went over easily, the back of his head striking the pillow, down comforter crumpling crisply beneath his body. This time, Fenris’s hands were on Anders’s shoulders instead of at his throat.

The kindness didn’t leave Anders any less breathless.

His hands twitched against Fenris’s back, at last uncertain of themselves—until he caught sight of the expression on Fenris’s face. All the forcefulness in him seemed to have evaporated with that single gesture, his momentum stilted as he gazed downward, hushed.

‘It’s all right,’ Anders found himself murmuring; he let his hand slide up from Fenris’s shoulders to the back of his neck, fingers tangling in his white hair. ‘Although that’s…actually the reaction most people have when they’re about to kiss me.’

He had time to register Fenris’s expression turning slack with shock, green eyes _dangerous_ with how wide and beguiling they suddenly looked, before Anders finished what he’d started, leaned up and closed the distance between them. It was his first kiss as a free man—with no one, not the Wardens, not the Circle, not _Justice_ , to answer to.

Anders tried not to be overwhelmed by it all, the sharp clench of Fenris’s hands against his shoulders, the panicked gasp he breathed against Anders’s mouth before their lips connected—and Fenris kissed him back.

He kissed in almost exactly the same way he fought: swift, relentless, and without any fuss. He kissed like a starving man let loose at a banquet, like a drowning man grasping for a rope; he kissed as though he expected any small succor to disappear the moment he reached out to take it. His teeth found Anders’s lower lip, nipping and tugging until Anders’s mouth opened in surprise, and Fenris shifted forward to take advantage of _that_ , too, his body settling more heavily between Anders’s legs.

A warm shudder rippled through Anders’s body at the feel of it. Such a simple pleasure, and something he’d denied himself for so long in the hopes of becoming something better—something _greater_ than the needs of a weak body that housed each warring impulse. He’d ignored all his smaller, _mortal_ desires, all for hundreds of faceless brothers and sisters he’d never meet.

He’d done his part, but a man couldn’t live like that forever. Anders suspected privately that _Fenris_ couldn’t, either, and what was more, he didn’t want to. Neither of them knew how to break free of the coffins they’d built themselves, narrow boxes of solitude and stubbornness, but that didn’t mean there was no point in trying.

Anders had always been one for a lost cause. Just not when that lost cause was _his_ , in particular.

So he thought of it as Fenris’s instead, and somehow, that made it easier.

Fenris twisted against him in an effort to keep the higher ground, to improve his position; he explored Anders’s mouth with a curiosity that bordered on the obscene. Anders let him do it, moving only to spread his legs wider, heels tangled in the sheets, granting Fenris permission as _he’d_ been granted permission earlier. A repetition of sorts, which Anders was only just now beginning to realize wasn’t what it seemed. It was a call and an answer—a promise, and not a holding pattern.

Fenris seemed to remember the gauntlets at the same moment Anders did—with the fingers of one hand curved by Anders’s cheek, the other clenched in a torn buckle over his chest, already hanging by little more than a thread. Anders glanced sidelong, not nervous, just thoughtful, toward the hint of late evening sunlight upon metal, then swallowed, unable to find his usual store of anecdotal humor and uncomplicated comfort.

He’d done this, so many times; all he had to say was, _do you think, possibly, Fenris, you could take those off; they do look a bit too pointy for this particular endeavor_ , and it would all be easy, or at least, as easy as that.

But Fenris didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, fingers curling sharply inward toward the palm. Anders reached up, touching the back of his wrist, feeling leather and metal and his own sweat—but somehow less clinical than the combination when it was only his skin and the saarebas collar. Fenris arched away, but he allowed it, and Anders slipped one glove free, then the other, dropping them over the side of the bed, two dull thuds against the floor.

‘We should try to remember not to step on those later,’ Anders suggested. Fenris made no move to continue, not with his bare hands. Something nervous fluttered in Anders’s chest and he supposed he needed to do something, to find their momentum, to keep it all going. He made for the buckles of his coat, sliding them free from top to bottom; in this position, it was all too warm anyway.

With anyone else—with anything ultimately meaningless, purely physical, lacking the weight of so much history behind it—Anders would have wriggled his hips and laughed breathlessly, or cupped his palm against his partner’s throat, running his thumb beside the corner of their mouth, teasing.

Fenris, however, was different, and every touch—by sheer virtue of who he’d always been—had to mean something. One more step in a tangled maze.

Perhaps that was exactly what Fenris was thinking. He held his hands as though they weren’t yet empty, as though they were still narrowed down to fearsome, bladed tips, and any gesture he made, by necessity, would be a killing stroke.

Anders shook his head, hair coming loose over the pillow.

‘Just…touch me,’ he said, with only the barest hint of a whine beneath the tone.

And Fenris did, fingers brushing lightly along the side of Anders’s throat.

‘Does it hurt?’ he asked, and Anders shook his head, breathless, _no_. Fenris looked as though he might say something more, something obvious, so Anders pushed his coat open to the waist, and arched his back along the touch, Fenris’s thumb in the dip at the center of his collarbone.

That seemed to do the trick, a physical suggestion implying so much more than a verbal request. Fenris’s bare fingers moved down past the bone, over Anders’s bare chest, through the pale hair and the shadows on even paler skin. He ghosted a warm touch, no hint of nail, all the way down the center to his belly, where the hair started again, a narrow stretch traveling just below the navel and beyond. One of Fenris’s dark brows quirked at the sight, pushing fabric aside, and Anders felt the expression run straight through him like chain lightning through a templar phalanx, bright, unforgiving heat melting polished steel.

He wished he knew what Fenris knew, in that moment—the genuine surprise of observance, the perspective only someone else could have on another person’s body. It might have made everything come together, might have made Anders seem like _Anders_ after all, but then Fenris’s thumb rubbed through the darkening patch of hair above his cock, beneath which the skin was so _sensitive_ , and it stopped mattering completely where one of them ended, and the other one began.

Anders felt his hands rise, resting in the air over Fenris’s shoulders. He didn’t bring them down again, and the tension in the muscle, the flash of lyrium light above, let him know they were both thinking about the same thing.

‘…It does not hurt,’ Fenris said at last. ‘Not the way I thought it would. Not in the way he _told me_ …’

Anders sucked in a breath, chest swelling, skin jumping beneath the press of Fenris’s palm. ‘Good,’ he replied, and meant it, more than anything that came before, probably more than anything that might come after.

When he dropped his touch to Fenris’s skin, they both sighed in relief. Fenris turned his head, his long neck, one cheek brushing against Anders’s knuckles, and shied away from the touch before seeking it out again, rubbing his jaw along the back of Anders’s hand. Finally, Anders let his thumb rest against the corner of his mouth, and Fenris kissed it, the press of his lips along the tip making Anders, suddenly boneless, choke on a moan.

‘Touch me,’ Fenris suggested.

 _Repetition._ Need. Fenris, Anders. Where one began; where the other ended.

Anders dropped a touch against that hollow in the collarbone; then, with no hint of nail, let his forefinger slide down the center of Fenris’s lean chest, feeling each swell and fall of each hopeful breath. They stopped with their hands in the same place, and Anders licked his lower lip; then, Fenris leaned down to repeat the action, tongue on Anders’s mouth, hot breath on hot breath.

‘How do you like to be touched, Fenris?’ Anders asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Fenris admitted. It was marginally better than before, when his answer might have been simply: _I do not._

‘Fair enough,’ Anders said, voice cracking on the second syllable. Fenris’s skin was smoother than Antivan leather, smoother than the skin of a baby nug Oghren had kept and then eaten one winter at Vigil’s Keep. If it weren’t for the subtle raised lines of the tattoos scrawled over his skin like webbing, there would have been nothing to mar it.

But that too was part of Fenris; he _was_ the tattoos, even as he wasn’t. At least it seemed as though they didn’t cause him pain, not in the same way Anders had feared they might.

Fenris’s hips rocked forward unexpectedly as Anders’s hand dipped lower, unthinking, toward his trousers. He growled low in his throat, bare fingers beating Anders to the cause as he wiggled out of his lap, the first to draw Anders’s threadbare pants down his thighs. The erection he’d bared was obvious even through the white fabric of Anders’s smalls—Anders was too busy trying to remember how to breathe to feel embarrassed about it. He wasn’t alone, not in this, not in anything, and that was what mattered most.

As if caught by some siren’s lure, Fenris reached forward to draw aside Anders’s smallclothes next, doing so with more gentleness than Anders had dared to expect. Honestly, once they’d started this endeavor, he’d already resigned himself to his clothes lying in shreds and tatters at the end of it.

But in this, as in all things, Fenris seemed to take perverse pleasure from defying expectation.

Now, Fenris stared—there was no other word for it—his eyes blown dark with desire as he looked down at Anders’s naked cock.

It was the same look they’d seen Bartrand give the lyrium idol, a comparison which made Anders’s stomach twist in fear. He didn’t want to be the reason for anyone’s eventual downfall and madness. He’d caused quite enough of that for _himself_ over the years.

Unbidden, Fenris reached forward, slender fingers caressing the base of Anders’s dick, knuckles moving with impossible care against the soft skin of his balls.

‘Are you hairy _everywhere_?’ Fenris demanded, lifting his eyes to meet Anders’s face at last.

That was it, somehow, that small accusation in the wide expanse of a fine room that wasn’t theirs that set Anders off at last. He laughed helplessly, reaching for Fenris so he could repeat the favor, could undress _him_ in turn, from the waist down. His heart was somewhere high in his throat, choking him with the force of his pulse; Fenris crawled back on top of him, lithe, hairless body completely naked, and when he lowered his hips to press their erections together Anders shook like the house was rumbling beneath them.

He knew what came next—or at least he _thought_ he did—but Fenris leaned in and buried his face in at the warm crook where Anders’s neck met his shoulder. Fenris’s hips jerked, and his breath came out unsteadily, one hand sliding up to scratch at Anders’s chest.

‘I don’t want to…’ Fenris panted, then changed tacks, fingers threading through Anders’s chest hair, nails delicately raking over the pink rise of his left nipple until it spiked, hard. ‘Would you— I can’t…’ He trailed off, growling when words failed him a second time.

Anders swallowed, trying and failing to parse the request. He was a mage, not a mind-reader, and his skill had never been in understanding the subtle nuances of how some _other_ person thought. He had trouble enough understanding his own subtle nuances. Then, Fenris bit his throat, mouth seizing around the hammering pulse point as he slowed the movement of his hips, rising deliberately, then settling back again, so that his ass came up pointedly against the head of Anders’s cock.

‘ _That,_ ’ Fenris said, as Anders let out a sound at a pitch that could only be heard by hounds. Embarrassing, yes, but it _had_ been a while. His entire body trembled with the force it required not to take Fenris at his suggestion then and there.

He wanted to take him. Quite badly, in fact.

‘Are you…sure…?’ Anders asked. Of all the things not to believe, this was the most physical, the most pertinent. What he knew about Fenris’s past didn’t amount to much, but it stood to reason that someone who couldn’t bear to be touched for the majority of their shared past wouldn’t want to allow someone that kind of intimate access, either.

‘Yes,’ Fenris said, just as certain as ever, just as infuriatingly simple. Then, sensing Anders’s hesitation, he huffed in the back of his throat. ‘I have never—in such a way, with another man. And I would not wish to do it incorrectly, thereby harming you in some way.’

‘Oh,’ Anders said, a familiar feeling flaring hot in his chest. The urge to heal made itself known once more, only there was no clear avenue for his magic to take—no simple, wickedly applied grease spell that would solve all their problems. No; it was never that easy, and Anders was going to have to rely on other, more traditional methods, _of course_.

There would time enough later for reassurance—and then, for experimentation. But for the moment, Anders merely did as he must, as they needed, as he could, rolling Fenris to one side as he searched the floor for one of the myriad pots of vanity-cream he’d tinkered with before kicking across the room the other night. A glove came first, sharp talons pressed against his palm; then the other; then something smooth and chill and porcelain, with a loose stopper.

Anders warmed it against his fingers the old-fashioned way; he stroked himself while Fenris watched, and tried not to feel too sensitive, tried not to think about the heat of the blush on his cheeks and chest. Then, he slicked a finger back from Fenris’s balls, between his legs, beneath the curve of his ass.

There was a time and a place for treating someone like a broken thing, and this was neither, because neither of them _were_ broken.

At least, not completely.

Fenris hissed and clenched his eyes against the press of the first finger, slick with unscented lotion; Anders had to fight back a moan when Fenris, stubborn, suddenly acquiesced. His cock twitched and his tattoos blazed hot when he finally guided himself down onto Anders’s erection; then, pleasure surged through Anders’s skin until it felt stretched as tight as a drum.

‘ _Mage,_ ’ Fenris gasped, the word like a lover’s epithet instead of the curse Anders had grown accustomed to weathering. He worked his hips in short, jerking thrusts, eyes closed, face tipped up toward the ceiling.

It would have been so easy for Anders to give himself over in that moment, to rock with the joined motion of their hips, guiding himself to climax while remaining heedless, stupid, a fever pitch of _want_ and _take_ approximating _need_. He’d done it countless times before; neither time nor distance could quell those instincts.

Instead, Anders reached out a shaking hand, fingers grasping the erection before him, Fenris’s knees pressed into the rumpled bedclothes on either side of his chest. He wrapped his fingers around the length and gave a hard stroke, gratified when it had the desired result, when Fenris’s back arched fine as a bowstring, and the look on his face suggested he might—sometimes—be capable of forgetting the truth, and everything else that came with it.

Anders couldn’t call on any of his tricks to help him now, any of the little lessons learned from another lifetime devoted to minor acts of deviance. No electric pulse along the tip or wicked warmth hidden against the palm of his hand—none of it was welcome here, not with _this_ person, not in _this_ bed. Instead, he had only his hands, smooth and smelling distantly of elfroot, the occasional softened callus from clenching his staff too tightly in the grip of a battle-spell. They were a healer’s hands, doing a healer’s work. His thumb rubbed at the slit and the vein pulsed and Fenris braced himself on Anders’s shoulders; Anders’s mouth opened when Fenris came across his belly, and cried out for him, following soon after into blind release.

*

Afterward, dazedly, they didn’t hold each other. Anders resisted the urge to curl up like a cat at Fenris’s side; touching after sex was so much more intimate than anything that came before.

Instead, he felt Fenris’s chest rise and fall from a close distance, a different rhythm now than the one he remembered. He closed his eyes, fingers curling, indulging in a comfortable stretch, all the way down to the tips of his toes, currently tangled in the coverlet.

‘It really isn’t fair,’ he said then, hand hovering somewhere just above Fenris’s hip. His thumb twitched, but he didn’t drop it, while Fenris’s expression glinted in the darkness, and offered no mercy when it came to allowing any interpretation. ‘I mean… You barely even sweat. Here I am, positively on fire, and I’m the only one who…’

Anders trailed off when Fenris took his wrist, pressing his hand downward over bare skin, taut muscle and hard bone. He felt the press of Fenris’s palm covering his hand, and the press of his palm covering Fenris’s hip, one on top of the other, neat as you please. It was all the reassurance he’d needed, but hadn’t known how to ask for. He closed his eyes again, enjoying the sheer physical relief of an act that had no further meaning beyond two people, and therefore meant everything, at least as far as Anders was concerned.

‘I am warm,’ Fenris informed him.

Anders inched his head closer on the pillow, then rested his chin, very carefully, against Fenris’s shoulder.

‘So you are,’ he said, while Fenris allowed him to remain there, for the rest of the night, and straight through morning.

*

By the time Anders woke, Fenris was awake already, holding very still, in a noble effort not to disturb him. It couldn’t possibly have been comfortable, but Anders also didn’t entirely regret it, allowing himself one moment longer—despite the streak of bright sunlight falling over his face—to entertain the pleasures, and the mysteries, of the night before. In the moment, they didn’t have to be explained, but Anders knew he’d start thinking about it the instant he opened his eyes—maybe even sooner than that; maybe he’d started thinking already. And thinking about sex was, he recalled, the absolute worst thing one could do in order to destroy the false sense of immediacy it presented.

Unfortunately, there was still so much to think about.

There were why’s that needed addressing, though thankfully there weren’t any who’s. _Or Howes_ , Anders thought after that, a terrible joke, one he’d indulged in making out loud before, so long ago he didn’t have the heart to be embarrassed by the memory anymore.

These things happened, and they seemed so important at the time, but eventually you put it all behind you; eventually, most of the little things lost their power, or proved they never had any to begin with.

Anders supposed they’d have to be embarrassed about this at some point, or at the very least they’d have to be awkward. Stilted conversation, heavy pauses, long silences that stretched out forever—then again, that was a conversation with Fenris on a good day. Hardly anything would change as far as _talking_ , or rather _not talking_ , went.

It had been a desperate act, but unlike most desperate acts, Anders hadn’t already decided he didn’t want to repeat it. He did want to repeat it. Maybe it was a bit of displacement, for both of them. Maybe it was foolish to think there was ever anything more than that between two people, anyway.

And, Anders concluded, maybe there was no point in thinking about it this early in the morning. Whatever came next would probably be inherently awful, but not because of their actions, and there was almost comfort to be found in the inevitability of that.

Not the same kind of comfort there was in the press of Fenris’s shoulder to Anders’s cheek, the heat trapped between their skin. But Anders, for once, had both, and wasn’t that nice?

‘I’m probably tickling you, aren’t I,’ Anders said. Fenris didn’t twitch, which meant Fenris had already known he was awake, and Anders spent a little more time than usual taking stock of where everything was, his body and Fenris’s body, their respective nakedness hardly discreet. Then, finally, Anders opened one eye, to see Fenris’s jaw and cheek, the stark lines of his profile, his mouth parted as he contemplated what one even said in a moment as unsuitably bizarre as this one.

‘…I hadn’t noticed,’ Fenris replied.

Anders chuckled, an unfamiliar sound. He untangled his body from where it pressed too close, mostly their legs, stiff and sore in all the best ways, the small of his back aching—he was no longer a young man, and the years had been hard, especially the more recent ones. He groaned, and Fenris tensed, and Anders saw him for the first time, completely naked, in the full light of day.

He froze where he was, hair in his face, Fenris caught in the shadow his body cast. It felt as though they might live forever in the silence this moment offered them—and so, Anders decided, it was up to him to say something.

‘I always thought I’d wake up next to Varric before I woke up next to you,’ he said, helpless, hopeful.

Fenris’s lips twitched, the only hint of motion in his face. ‘Don’t pretend for my sake, mage. I already know how you feel about that dwarf.’

‘Oh _dear,_ ’ Anders said, falling into the familiar rhythm with some gratitude. Fenris didn’t seem like the type to engage in pithy pillow-talk, which meant that he had to be putting forth an effort. Either that, or the secret of getting Fenris to _talk_ lay somewhere in the vicinity of _getting him into bed_. ‘You don’t think I’ve been too obvious, do you? Have I ruined my chances to become _Anders Tethras,_ Terror of the Merchant’s Guild?’

‘Too far,’ Fenris informed him. Despite the tension in his body, he hadn’t reached for the blanket, nor made any attempt to cover his nakedness. ‘Just because a thing is funny once does not mean you have to draw it out indefinitely.’

‘You think I’m funny?’ Anders asked, resting his chin against the palm of his hand. Fenris did move then, lazily pressing their bodies together as he rolled past Anders on the bed. His only response was a grunt, neither yes nor no, and when he leaned over to pick something up off the floor, Anders took the opportunity to peer at the upper rise of his ass.

It was rather flat, being attached to an elf and all, but staring at the curve of dark muscle where it disappeared against the mattress and knowing he’d hand his hands on it last night did elicit an answering call of desire, _continued_ and _sustainable_ longing, and that meant everything.

‘I can’t believe you just gave _me_ advice on how to be funny,’ Anders tried again, sweeping his hair back from his face in an attempt to look less scraggly.

But Fenris’s attention was wholly on the garment in front of him—Anders’s tattered coat thrown across his naked lap. He picked over the fresh tears in it with an expression of growing distaste; judging by that sour turn of his mouth, he seemed to be taking the wear and tear personally, for whatever reason.

Anders watched as his clever brown fingers examined one of the mended seams, then compared it to a freshly-opened rip. The way he held the garment seemed to imply he knew his way around it, which meant he’d engaged in such investigations already.

The copper dropped. Anders’s belly did a backflip.

‘ _You?_ ’ he exclaimed, unable to contain himself. Fenris looked up from the coat, alarmed. ‘I mean— _You_ were the one who fixed my coat?’

‘Hardly,’ Fenris said, with a neat little scoff. ‘One does not stopper a flood with a bit of cork, after all. I didn’t have the right materials to work with.’

A giggle of disbelief escaped Anders’s throat. He was too slow to turn it into a cough. ‘I’m sorry—no, I shouldn’t laugh. I just never imagined… I didn’t know you _sewed._ ’

‘It passes the time,’ Fenris said, through clenched teeth.

‘Most people read if they can’t sleep,’ Anders pointed out, which earned him a coat in the face. He spat out an errant feather, feeling its stiff bristles against his tongue.

‘‘Most people,’’ Fenris agreed, before he slid out of bed.

That, Anders supposed, was the end of that. As far as conversations between them went, it hadn’t been too bad. In fact, it wasn’t even the strangest conversation Anders had engaged in post-coitus, although Fenris _was_ the strangest partner he’d ever had it with. That was what kept tripping Anders up, although it didn’t stop him from watching appreciatively as Fenris dressed himself, in the meager morning sunlight slanting through the loose curtains.

‘Get up,’ Fenris suggested. His back was to Anders as he wriggled into his spindly suit of armor. Beneath his appreciation, Anders also felt the stirrings of anxiety as he watched Fenris’s stiff, disconnected movements. He’d taken to the healing well, but that didn’t mean he’d be back to his former strength for at least a day or two more. In retrospect, a belatedly desperate romp in the sack probably hadn’t been the _best_ thing for his freshly tended wounds.

A good healer would have prescribed bed _rest_ , not bed _other things_.

‘Oh?’ Anders said, sticking his head beneath the bed in a futile search for his smallclothes. ‘Are you sure? Because I have a tantalizing alternative for you, and it involves lying in bed for at _least_ another hour. What do you say?’

Fenris said nothing, but drew the canopy curtains around the bed to obscure Anders from view—a gesture which seemed rather _rude_ , especially coming from someone who’d done the mending on his coat just the other night.

Then the door to the master bedroom creaked open, and Anders froze in place.

‘Good morning, messere,’ Bodahn’s voice said airily. ‘I certainly hope you slept well—and might I just say what a _relief_ it is to see you up and about again so soon after your injuries? That Anders is a wonder. For a mage, of course. If they’ve got to exist, at least some of them have their uses. Am I right?’

‘Yes,’ Fenris said, so tightly that Anders could picture him gritting his teeth.

Crouched behind the curtains, still half-naked and praying he wouldn’t be heard, Anders couldn’t help but be reminded of his _early_ days in the Circle Tower, hiding under Karl Thekla’s bed while Senior Enchanter Torrin made his rounds.

Frightening to realize he hadn’t matured much past the age of sixteen, despite the gray hairs he’d picked up along the way.

‘Ah!’ Bodahn said, so suddenly that it nearly stopped Anders’s heart. He waited for the curtains to be thrown back. They weren’t. ‘That’s right, messere. Master _Hawke_ left you a message. Normally, I’d have let you sleep, but it seemed rather urgent.’

‘Speak,’ Fenris told him. Beneath the sound of Bodahn’s renewed chatter, Anders began surreptitiously to dress himself, shimmying horizontally into his trousers, praying that the bed-frame wouldn’t creak.

*

Hawke’s message was simple enough. He’d be taking Fenris’s place in the trials, and if Fenris didn’t want him to show up at the end of the day and tear the mansion down, then he’d best make an appearance later, just to prove he’d healed up all right. Quite frankly, Anders had his doubts about whether returning to the arena was the best idea for them, but Fenris didn’t seem to mind.

On the contrary, he was almost calm about it.

‘You aren’t going to decide to fight again, are you?’ Anders asked, pausing in the midst of trying to tie the lost buckle back on.

Fenris made a noise, brushing his hands out of the way to finish what Anders had begun. Anders stilled, and watched his face while he tied the knot; when Fenris caught him staring, they both looked away.

‘It won’t be necessary,’ Fenris said. ‘Hawke will be fighting.’

If that disturbed him—his own sense of justice, a persnickety set of oftentimes admirable morals—he chose not to bring attention to it.

Anders tested the strength of the thread looped around the metal, then realized how pointless it was to bother with what the rest of him looked like. It was the collar everyone noticed—the collar he’d once again be wearing, in the bright summer sunlight of Minrathous, mid-noon. The thought made him irritable despite himself. ‘You don’t _know_ that, actually.’

Nevertheless, neither of them wanted to anger Hawke no matter the incarnation. Anders supposed he could accept the benefits of the decision as well as he could understand the drawbacks. When Fenris settled the collar against his neck, Anders had already decided he was done complaining.

At least, for the time being.

It proved a wonder watching Hawke at work—not the master force mage Anders knew and trusted, but a different sort of magician here, a beast with a broadsword; even Sebastian, not exactly his most enthusiastic sponsor, had to admit he was incredible.

‘And my gift, Fenris?’ Sebastian asked. This time, seeing him lean too close with a hand on Fenris’s armored knee placed Anders in the very uncomfortable position of wishing to murder the man with his own collar’s chain. ‘What did you think of it?’

‘It was…unexpected,’ Fenris replied mildly, which Sebastian seemed to find delightful, but which didn’t help Anders’s homicidal feelings any.

Hawke didn’t tire until the sun was sinking low over the sea. Dripping sweat, wiping his face with a red kerchief, he draped himself over the railing before Sebastian’s private box, all tan skin and thick muscle, and a flash of white teeth against his dark beard. Anders recognized the impulse, could tell that he was showing off, and that he wanted—very badly, in fact—for Fenris to notice him in some vital, immediate way, as though he were the only other person in the arena. And Fenris had every right to react in kind, since he appreciated a man with hair, apparently.

Still, all Fenris offered was a nod Hawke’s way, so simple and so unsatisfactory that Anders almost felt bad for the poor man, until he remembered to feel pleased for himself.

Ultimately, he couldn’t assume it meant anything. Just that Fenris wasn’t the sort who indulged in public displays, or even noticed these particular things—both details Anders had known already.

Then, he caught Sebastian watching him, a clear, cool blue gaze beneath so much blue sky, and he returned to the study of his boots, all the cracks in the leather suddenly so much more interesting than watching Hawke try to flirt unsuccessfully.

‘Well,’ he said, once they were home again, rubbing at the ache in the back of his neck. ‘That was certainly…something. Indescribable. Incredible how everything went sour here, isn’t it?’

‘Give it time,’ Fenris said, presumably meaning he expected all things to go sour, in the end.

‘Cheerful.’ Anders frowned, fingers pressed beneath the swell of his skull, surreptitiously trying to heal the stiffness there. ‘Honestly, I just think you need to eat some dinner, Fenris. People—yes, even elves—get cranky when they’re hungry.’

Yet they didn’t eat; they drank instead, both of them at a comfortable distance from one another, sharing the same couch, _together_. Anders felt a little flutter of hope come to life and die again, over and over, in the center of his belly; the more he tried to quiet it with wine, the louder it became. He needed whiskey for that numbing purpose; anything more expensive, more _red_ , only set the mood for romance, and gave him too many ideas, rather than picking them off one by one. Whiskey was like an archer; red wine was like a dwarven forge.

Perhaps the metaphor needed some work. Perhaps Anders was still a humiliating drunk.

And, he reminded himself, there was no reason to hope. Hope was the antithesis of his entire existence, or the past ten years of that existence, anyway. His purpose had refused hope; his cause had superseded it. He didn’t need hope—so _he_ said—because hope was a weakness, a dependence on unrelated forces. Hope had absolutely nothing to do with Justice.

They’d come together out of mutual need—the way Anders met up with everyone, it seemed. And it served its purpose. Perhaps, Anders thought, _perhaps_ , the moment had passed, and they were better now, and hope continued to avoid him, knowing it had long since worn out its unsubtle welcome.

Then, Fenris’s knee bumped against his as he reached over to return the Agreggio; Fenris’s hand closed over his fingers along the bottleneck. Hope became desire became possibility, and Anders crawled up onto Fenris’s lap, while Fenris held him steady, finger-guards sharp at his lower back.

It was all so silly, so juvenile, both of them grinding into one another, kissing each other’s wine-sweet mouths. Anders came too fast, trousers still on, and laughed at himself, then slithered down between Fenris’s calves, on his knees on the cold tile floor.

‘Trust me,’ Anders said, one hand on each thigh. ‘Even drunk, I’m still very— _very_ good at this.’

Fenris breathed in sharply as Anders reached up, finding the hidden buckles and catches that held his armor together, drawing down his trousers. The erection that sprang free was the only part of Fenris that _wasn’t_ obscured by bright lyrium tattoos, a fact which Anders couldn’t help but be oddly grateful for. He knew the marks had caused Fenris pain—it was nearly unbearable to imagine them scored over so sensitive a place.

Then, before he killed the mood completely, he took Fenris’s cock in his hand, guided it capably into his mouth and swallowed deeply.

There were so many different ways to give pleasure, so many different ways to be _close_ to another person. Anders had nearly allowed himself to forget them. He’d really thought there wouldn’t be time, in the future, to reclaim them, one by one, just like this.

Despite how calm he’d seemed while they were kissing on the couch, Fenris spent himself in Anders’s mouth not long after they’d begun. Anders licked him clean, eager and sloppy, oblivious to Fenris’s motions around him—armored hands slipping beneath his arms to tug him to his feet.

They dragged one another unsteadily toward the bed, Fenris half-carrying Anders on their way, but half-stumbling against him, too. There was a distinct curve to his lips that Anders couldn’t make sense of in the dark. He’d never seen something even _close_ to a smile pass over Fenris’s face, certainly not in his presence, _certainly_ not because of anything he’d done.

Under the covers, they rubbed up against each other as they settled in, Fenris’s skin against the threadbare material of Anders’s clothing. Clothing Fenris had tried to mend—Anders had to keep reminding himself of that, if only because it was the most unbelievable thing he’d encountered to date. Fenris, trying to be a healer.

Fenris fell asleep with his thigh pressed up against Anders’s softening cock, silky head pressed against his chest. His fingers stilled where they’d been tracing whorls in Anders’s chest hair, a strange fascination that Anders thought he might _possibly_ never tire of.

With anyone else, the weight might have been too heavy, would have made it difficult for Anders to breathe. But Fenris was small and he weighed practically nothing at all—probably one of the tricks behind his merciless speed. Anders settled his hand in the small of Fenris’s back where it dipped, stroking him gently until the light in his skin went out, and his breathing grew even and deep.

 _Peace_ wasn’t a concept Anders ever thought he might entertain, beyond the repetition, beyond the addition: _there can be none_. And it was nothing he’d ever associated with Fenris.

But there, in a room that belonged to a Tevinter slaver, he drifted into sleep more easily than he had in ages, and his dreams were undisturbed by spirits _or_ darkspawn.

*

Anders woke _not_ due to any suspicious noise, but because Fenris had jerked to attention against his chest, gauntlets tearing a hole in the pillow. He lay there, poised, like a cat that had suddenly scented a hound in the distance. Anders had experienced this exact trouble with Ser Pounce-a-lot and the Warden Commander’s mabari on more than one occasion, sharp nails digging into soft flesh.

Somehow, this felt more serious than that.

‘Fenris…?’ Anders muttered, not able to sit up with the elf against him.

‘Shh,’ Fenris hissed. He didn’t look back toward Anders, but moved deliberately into a sitting position. ‘There’s someone in the house.’

Well of _course_ there was someone in the house, Anders wanted to say, ignoring the sudden racing of his stubborn heart. Just because they’d finally caught Bodahn in the act—creeping around and watering all the potted plants or whatever it was he did at this hour—was no cause for alarm. And yet here he was, feeling alarmed nonetheless.

He was too old for this; too old to be woken in the middle of the night and _certainly_ too old for ‘someone in the house.’ If they ever made it back to their proper world again, Anders was going to have a long talk with Varric about the ideas he had regarding comfortable retirement plans for revolutionary mages.

Anders listened, ears straining in the dark. His hand found Fenris’s arm and the tattoos flared to life, giving them at least some light beneath the fall of the canopy.

‘I don’t _hear_ anything,’ Anders insisted, at least remembering to whisper.

‘ _Hush,_ ’ Fenris insisted. The word had barely left his mouth before it was followed by an enormous _crash_ ; the door splintered inward, an invisible force-spell sweeping through the room, over Anders’s head, knocking Fenris straight out of bed.

He recovered perhaps faster than Anders himself—even though _Anders_ hadn’t been hit by anything—and sprang to his feet immediately, retrieving his sword where it had been discarded during their earlier bout of drinking and foreplay.

Anders shouted as another spell launched its way across the room, wind shackling Fenris’s sword arm high in the air above him. He cursed and twisted, grip slipping open to drop his sword into his free hand.

‘ _Mages,_ ’ Fenris spat. Anders felt a twist of something he couldn’t quite place in the pit of his belly. Fear, maybe, but also anticipation. He wanted to help, on either end, but he felt rooted in place, unable to move. And also, he _recognized_ that force-work, the wind shackles and indirect blows, never quite going for the kill, ruthless but not without mercy.

 _Mages_ , Anders thought, but also: _ghosts._ There were far too many of them here.

The shift in the air pressure was indicative of something else in store; an arrow whizzed through the gauzy curtains, unhindered by any petty obstacles, and buried itself in the wall beside Fenris’s head, cracking the tile in the mosaic. It was too pointed to have missed the mark; Anders assumed it was a warning shot. And another spell was coming, too, stronger, a fist of wind, building somewhere from the mess of a doorway.

It was that pressure that provided the impetus, that buildup of redirected gravity at Anders’s back that shoved him, ready or not, into some kind of action. He hurtled forward, scrabbling through a tangle of sheets and torn canopy whipped about by the miniature storm, then threw himself against Fenris’s body, flattening them both against the wall.

He wasn’t accustomed to this: the impulse to be a human shield. Then, with an apology whispered against Fenris’s cheek, he did what he should have long ago—what he would have, if he were younger, and still so impetuous. The arcane shield went up around both of them, coloring the air with a faint, greenish sort of brown, half-transparent, half-opaque. He held it firm and unshakeable against the onslaught, a volleyed ping of arrows—and a force spell that never came.

Silence filled the room, then Fenris’s ragged breathing in Anders’s ear, hot along the shell, uneven with the rapid rise and fall of his chest. He shied away from the magic around them, and the lyrium glow along his bare skin was so bright and so fierce from this close that Anders nearly went mad with it, neither of them particularly _good_ for one another, or comfortable, or well-suited. Not when it came to this.

Anders braced himself for a second round, to hold the barrier to the very last. But all that anticipation proved unnecessary. Their assailants had stopped attacking them, though Anders felt the rumble of potential in the floorboards—he could be certain of nothing yet, the attack itself, _or_ the subsequent, unpredicted détente.

With his back to the door, he felt more naked than simple nudity would have allowed. The swirl of arcane power around him seemed to bring a deadly silence with it, though these shields weren’t meant to block out sound.

Then, a familiar voice, dredged from memories so ancient Anders wondered if this wasn’t any more real than a frenzied fever-dream. ‘ _Anders…_ ’

Anders couldn’t reply to it. He didn’t want to turn around. The magic that he recognized made sense to him, but not a common sense; he didn’t want to see the man who wielded it coming toward him, just past the smoky haze of his _own_ magic, a spell he’d learned from the mage in question.

‘That is your name,’ Fenris reminded him, pointed, still as breathless as Anders felt. His posture was so brittle Anders wondered if moving away from him wouldn’t cause him to shatter, just like the doorframe.

‘Not just my name,’ Anders replied dreadfully. ‘So many others have it, too—I mean, that was the whole point, once.’

‘Let him go,’ the voice said. It was closer now. Anders didn’t know which one of them it was talking to.

Despite all his lesser instincts, Anders finally turned around.

There, beyond the sheen of the distorted air, blown all funny like a reflection in a curved mirror, was Karl Thekla. Behind him, two figures barely moved in the shadows, something familiar about the taller one, and the shorter with a glimmer of blond hair, stepping into the moonlight, _an amateur_ , not at all at the level of professionalism as his companion.

Anders decided, for the time being, to focus on the immediate: Karl Thekla walking toward him, probably wanting some sort of revenge for Anders having killed him. If he’d even done that, here. If Karl had ever died. That wasn’t as much of a certainty as it should have been; Anders supposed he shouldn’t have wanted it to be, either, as sacrificing a good man’s life in order to make sense of things seemed a bit selfish no matter how you looked at it.

‘Anders,’ Karl said, with such a wealth of feeling, of _everything_. There was, happily, no brand on his forehead, beneath the fall of short, gray hair; there was nothing lost about his expression, nor the shade of his eyes. When he looked at Anders he saw Anders, and remembered things Anders didn’t, and he seemed so bloody relieved Anders felt his throat close, a collar that locked tight from within, a collar that had no key for _unlocking_ it again.

He shrank back against Fenris’s chest. One gauntleted hand closed around his hip; Anders thought to interpret that action as a sign of solidarity, and also probable desperation, both of them having panicked in their own way, neither of them knowing how to proceed from here.

‘Don’t touch him,’ Karl warned. Anders blinked. ‘It’s all right, Anders,’ Karl added, holding up one hand, staff in the other. He was still moving, slowly, so as not to appear threatening—as though he thought some sudden movement would cause Fenris to slit Anders’s throat with the sharp points of his finger-guards. ‘We aren’t here to hurt _you_. You can let the barrier down now, and we’ll take care of the rest.’

His gentle voice, his soothing demeanor—even the way he curved his fingers, hand empty, reaching toward them—made Anders want, very badly, to believe in what he said. It was an offer of forgiveness, he thought. The words meant something else, something more: _I’m still alive; you don’t have to be so sorry anymore for what happened to me_ and also _I’m the only one who knows what’s going on here; I’ve come to make things right again._

If only it could be that simple.

‘…Let the barrier down,’ Anders repeated. There was something about that, something that didn’t sit right with him. ‘Because…you aren’t going to hurt me—’ Then, realization dawned, a slow burn rather than a quick cut. He braced himself all over again. Karl wanted Anders to let the barrier down so he could _take care of the rest_ , so he could _take care of Fenris._ ‘No. Karl, you don’t understand—’

‘We’re wasting time,’ said the man over Karl’s shoulder, his voice about as harsh as freshly-hewn dwarven rock, his face swathed in a clever fall of shadows.

They weren’t enough to hide his enormous nose. Only one man in all of Thedas had a nose like _that_.

‘ _Nathaniel?_ ’ Anders asked. He felt Fenris’s fingers twitch against his hip, heard his breath rasping against the soft flesh of his earlobe. ‘…This is a dream, isn’t it? I’m dreaming.’

‘No, that’s really more _my_ department,’ the blond piped up, stepping forward. He was barely as tall as Karl’s shoulder, features distinctly _inhuman,_ too delicate for the shape of his face. Anders knew him—or Justice had. They’d gone into the Fade itself to save him, once, caught him wandering alone there, in the midst of his most secret desires. A personal thing; necessary, to save him. ‘I _wanted_ to come in through your dreams, you know, but Karl wouldn’t let me. He said I wasn’t practiced enough at it yet. As though I haven’t been practicing for _years_ —’

Karl took a step forward, and Anders’s shield flared brighter, a warning, warding him off. Through the magic, he could hear Karl give a little sigh, the way he had so often in the Circle when he was frustrated or disapproving. Back then, it had been little glyphs, lessons in miniature, nothing so grand as all this.

‘It’s all right,’ Anders found himself saying, even though the situation was _anything_ but. ‘Karl, you don’t have to— You see, there’s actually nothing to take care of.’

‘He isn’t Tranquil,’ Feynriel announced, although no one had asked him. ‘He sounds too…lively for that. Do you think he’s gone mad?’

‘Quiet,’ Karl bade him. His eyes never left Anders’s face. It was the sort of attention Anders would have gladly drunk in once, whether it was meant for him or not. But he was all too aware of his responsibility here, the tension of Fenris’s body against his own. They had to protect one another. He couldn’t let his guard down.

He was mercifully glad neither of them was completely naked. So in fact, there was always a way to make things worse.

‘Look.’ Anders drew in a deep breath, trusting himself enough to stand up straight without Fenris to support him. ‘I’m not wearing the… _my_ collar. You see? I’m not sleeping in that awful little cell, either. I know—I _understand_ what you came here to do, and I’m grateful for it, but this isn’t what you think. I’m not _mad_ or suddenly deprived of my senses, I just… You can’t kill him.’

‘We came here to rescue you,’ Karl said, although his gaze did drop to Anders’s neck. Beside him, Nathaniel swept the room until he located the collar, and the hidden door that led to the slave-cellar, all details that couldn’t have made sense to him; they barely made any sense to Anders. He hoped they wouldn’t think too much about what it meant that they’d both been in the same bad; he was old enough now that he rather appreciated the concept of privacy with regards to a relationship. ‘Anders—I’ll be frank. The resistance is suffering. Our cause is just, but we’re directionless. We have no leader. The man who started it all is kept in chains at the heart of our greatest defeat, and we… We _need_ something to unite us. We need a figurehead.’

Fenris stifled a sound of disbelief in his throat, too quiet for anyone else to hear, pressed in at Anders’s shoulder.

‘I’m not that person anymore,’ Anders murmured, meaning it beyond the obvious sense, the one Karl and the others wouldn’t leap to automatically. He was, quite literally, _not_ the man they thought they were talking to. Just a little bit of irony. Something to remind himself, a secret he and Fenris shared.

It wasn’t his only instinct. He did, vaguely, want to help that other Anders in some small way; if only he could have accepted the offer on _his_ behalf.

‘You are,’ Karl said. He came forward, looking Anders in the eye, still holding out his hand. ‘If you’ve forgotten…I’ll make it my life’s work to personally help you remember, Anders.’

It was, at face value, a good offer. Karl had always been a compelling speaker—perhaps better than he knew. But Karl was _dead_ in Anders’s world, killed by Anders’s own hand, and no amount of pretty speechifying would change that.

‘Karl…’ Anders said, drawing the single syllable out as his mind raced for alternatives. The idea of being separated from Fenris _now_ , left alone in a realm of strangers wearing well-known faces, would be like being pushed off the utmost peak of Sundermount—hurtling alone through a vast, unfamiliar space, down toward an inevitable crash. His chest tightened at the thought, squeezing his heart so that it fought for every pulse.

‘Take us both,’ Fenris suggested. His voice was steady, with no hint of the distaste and fear Anders knew he had to harbor at the prospect of joining yet more mages.

‘Both?’ Nathaniel asked. ‘Indeed, why _not_ bring a known enemy directly into the heart of the resistance? What a brilliant idea. I’m sure he isn’t a spy.’

The arcane barrier rippled, its sheen gaining focus even as Anders’s emotions clouded. He wasn’t the sort to panic under _real_ pressure—that skill was necessary for a healer—but everyone was being so entirely obtuse that it made him want to scream. He shared a look with Fenris from inside the safety of their bubble; the light in his skin shimmered and refracted off Anders’s magic wrapped around them.

This time, it was Fenris who broke eye contact first.

‘…Take me as your prisoner, if that suits you better,’ Fenris said, head bowed. Far from seeming drained, his body hummed with controlled energy. No doubt the lyrium was playing havoc with his adrenaline still—seeking the conclusion to a fight where there was none to be found. ‘I would not have us separated.’

‘Too dangerous,’ Karl said.

‘Then we can always stand here chatting for the rest of the night,’ Anders replied. ‘I’m sure there’s… I mean, in terms of catching up… How long have I been here, exactly? There’s so much I must have missed in a world I barely recognize.’

Aside from the private joke, he’d known that would annoy Nathaniel more than anything else; the impatience of a good rogue, who knew only swiftness and daring, who’d fight like mad to keep to the shadows that veiled him.

Karl drew away; the two conferred, with Feynriel unsure of whom to eavesdrop on first, focus split between his allies and the unknown factor: Fenris and Anders, pressed against the far wall, in the middle of some ancient Tevinter relief, between two griffons, the left missing its front paw, having been gravely wounded by one of Nathaniel’s well-aimed arrows. Anders wanted to take that time to speak with Fenris—about his disturbing propensity for thrusting himself in danger when it might not have been strictly necessary; for _agreeing_ to things that were obviously terrible ideas—but instead he held his silent vigil, their bodies pressed together where they stood.

And where was Bodahn now, Anders wondered—or had he been in on this all along, silently letting these men in during the night, wordlessly pointing them in the direction of his master? There was no way of knowing. It seemed unnecessary, at this point, to even care.

Finally, the long pause was over. Feynriel held up his staff, and Karl looked equal parts perplexed and resigned—as though, for whatever reason, he’d been expecting some kind of resistance all along. As though resistance was all he knew, not just from Anders, but from everyone, himself included in that approximation.

‘Is this what you require, Anders?’ Karl asked. Anders knew he’d probably have to account for it eventually. No matter how far he ran, no matter how many years passed him by, being held accountable seemed to be his only consistent destination. For all the little things—and all the big things, too.

Anders bowed his head. He thought of himself, of Justice and of Vengeance, of the many traps and pitfalls along all the roads leading to Tevinter. He thought of the collar by the bed, of the cell beyond the master bedroom, and of the shortening chain.

If there was something he could do for this man—this version of himself, who’d never had the _real_ assistance he so obviously needed—then perhaps this was it, his only chance to guide him out of harm’s way. He had the capacity for making good on his bargains, even the ones he’d never precisely struck in the first place. It was a sort of solidarity, in fact, in a way like the kind he’d found with Fenris. Someone he hadn’t known; someone he’d known all along. That type of thing.

‘Well, I can’t promise anything,’ Anders replied. His voice cracked mid-way, a combination of weariness and the acceptance of this burden, the _willing_ acceptance, his own lack of surprise, and ultimate readiness.

Everyone else, so well-trained in hiding their finer feelings, refused to react to the sound.

‘Of course not,’ Karl agreed, but Anders didn’t take the arcane shield down, not even when he stepped forward, and followed him out of Danarius’s summer pavilion.

*

They moved quickly through the streets, a route Anders was too tired and too lost to follow past the turn of the second corner. He didn’t know this place; despite all his experience, he was also terrible with nighttime escape routes, not to mention directions. It was all in someone else’s hands; there was little choice but to follow, a matter upon which, frighteningly enough, he and Fenris seemed to be in some measure of agreement. Along the way, they kept to the shadows, guided by Nathaniel’s liberal use of smoke-bombs, something to conceal their progress from the nearby villas, and also any potential templar patrols.

It was the blindest Anders had ever gone into anything, and therefore one of his stupidest plans. Considering the depth of the competitive field for that award, it was impressive, really. Just stunning.

The truth of the matter was they had no theories, not even the barest hint of an assumption, nothing more to guide them than Karl’s shadowy form in the dark. And Nathaniel at the back, with Feynriel, compounded that leadership. Sandwiched between two very dutiful people, Anders couldn’t help but feel the press of his own duty. Whatever that might be.

Soon enough, the smell of fish signaled they’d come to the docks, not nearly as repulsive in aroma or flavor as Kirkwall’s yards, but then again, what was? Nothing could compete with Kirkwall when it came to that brand of ambiance.

Then, they stopped before a warehouse, just one of many, and Karl traced a sigil along an abandoned door, half-hidden behind a surplus of brine-stinking crates. The door opened; they entered; the door shut behind them. It was everything Anders could have imagined when it came to daring acts of rescue in the night, save for a few key details: that his coat was falling to pieces, that his left boot had lost its sole a ways back, and that Fenris hadn’t been allowed to carry a weapon.

There was always the possibility that it was something other than a rescue—like, for example, an ambush.

One damp floorboard creaked beneath Anders’s foot as he stepped forward into the darkened, humid room. He winced, waiting for Nathaniel’s hiss of annoyance—something that would have come in the Deep Roads; an admittedly well-deserved _why is it that no mage I’ve ever met knows how to be quiet?_ —but instead of that, there was the hiss of flames, a little fire spell crackling to life and illuminating their companions.

There were more of them now than there had been outside—one more, to be exact, an old friend and a new acquaintance.

Isabela.

‘Well it’s about time,’ she said, sounding a little more like herself. ‘And here I thought I wasn’t getting paid tonight.’

Fenris snorted. Anders tried not to stare. In a way, it all made perfect sense yet again; Isabela was never happy existing as merely _one_ side of the coin when she could personify both. In that way, she was also rather greedy, a trait common amongst all pirates.

Her eyes danced wickedly as she took in the scene, pausing only slightly as she lingered on Fenris.

Naturally, she didn’t ask what had happened. One couldn’t pretend like they were two steps ahead of everyone else if they didn’t anticipate every kink and snag that might rise organically from even the most clever plan.

‘We were delayed,’ Nathaniel said. Good man, Nathaniel. He was _always_ willing to state the obvious, even when no one else thought it necessary.

‘I can see that,’ Isabela said. She crossed her arms beneath her chest, cocking her head to one side. Anders didn’t altogether like the way she was looking at Fenris, but there was no room for such pettiness, not in their current situation. ‘I _told_ Varric there was something going on between the two of you, but he said I was just _romanticizing_ again. And now, here I am, right as always. I can’t _wait_ to see the look on his face.’

Fenris sniffed, shaking out his left arm at Anders’s side. The metal of his vambrace caught against the fabric of Anders’s coat and held there for a moment, reminding him of their shared proximity. But that didn’t mean he knew whether or not Fenris had done it on purpose, and the moment was over too quickly for him to be certain.

‘Did he?’ Karl said, drily. Apparently he wasn’t entertained by Isabela’s tales of matrimonial life, which was odd, because the Karl _Anders_ had known would have found the whole thing hilarious. ‘I can’t imagine why.’

‘Oh _all right,_ ’ Isabela said, standing to one side with a huff. ‘I see how it is. No one wants to have any fun with little old me. You mages are awfully _serious_ about this cause of yours. I’ll have you know it won’t win you any popularity contests. Whatever happened to just enjoying a decent conversation with your affable liberators?’

‘Where’s your husband?’ Fenris asked, finding his voice as Karl took up the lead once more, guiding them through the darkened warehouse.

‘You know Varric,’ Isabela said, waving her hand like a bird in flight. A bird that wore jeweled rings on every finger and a few sizeable gold bracelets. ‘He’s like the sea. Can’t be tamed, can’t be tied down. That’s what I love about him. Well, that and his positively _enormous_ —’

‘Is that Karl?’ called a familiar voice from the depths of the wide storeroom. Bright light flared from the end of Feynriel’s staff, and Anders saw two large elvhen eyes inside a positively _enormous_ head; then, Merrill moved toward them and out of the shadows, her lithe body never _quite_ fragile, and all Anders’s memories of her spellwork anything but. ‘ _Aneth ara._ I didn’t expect you back this late, _lethallin._ ’

She was the certainly the _friendliest_ blood-mage Anders had ever met, but that was damning her with faint praise. Merrill had been the only topic upon which _Vengeance_ and Fenris had been able to see eye-to-eye, and he didn’t need to look over his shoulder to know exactly what Fenris was thinking about her sudden appearance. Anders could tell from the audible breath Fenris didn’t quite manage to smother, and the way his gauntlet clicked as his fingers twitched.

‘ _Aneth ara,_ Merrill,’ Feynriel said, dipping his staff with a nod. ‘As you can see, we _did_ find Anders—but he wouldn’t come without the other one, too.’

‘…Fenris?’ Merrill said. There was something about her tone that made everything sound like a jolly question, despite her rather serious demeanor. She was pale beneath the dark lines of her _vallaslin,_ and had none of the forest’s light dancing in her eyes. ‘This _is_ unexpected. I wouldn’t have thought you’d be sympathetic to our plight. And here I heard you were so close with that Sebastian fellow.’

‘Not…as close as it appeared,’ Fenris said, bravely carrying the sentence through to its conclusion.

‘Merrill,’ Anders said. He’d grown rather tired of everyone talking _about_ him instead of directly _to_ him. ‘Are _you_ …in charge here?’

‘Oh!’ Merrill said, putting a white hand to the tattered green scarf wrapped about her throat. At least some things really never changed—in appearance, if not in content. ‘I don’t know that I’d say that much, I’m afraid. I’ve been holding us together as best I can—I was in training once to be a Keeper, you see, so I know something of what it means to shepherd a clan of outcasts. But I was never the best person for the job. That’s always been you, Anders. We heard that Fenris was injured in the archon trials, and I thought that might be our best chance to snap you up. Before that, there was never really a good time.’

‘No,’ Anders agreed, letting his mouth take over where his nerves faltered. ‘There never really _is_ a good time to send two mages and a rogue in to fight a _known_ gladiator.’

Karl coughed, belatedly covering his mouth. ‘For some reason, experts in the broadsword aren’t lining up to throw their lots in with ours,’ he said. ‘As you can imagine, it’s been something of a shock to all of us.’

 _Karl,_ Anders thought, _you really have no idea._

What was really a shock—and a little sad, more than anything—was seeing how disorganized things were at the top. This small meeting couldn’t be indicative of their true numbers, but even so, it made the Mage Underground in Kirkwall look like a thriving resistance force. These people _did_ need Anders—they just didn’t know that the man they’d captured couldn’t provide them with the assistance, the purpose, they were looking for.

Whatever Anders had been relying on—the vague sense that maybe Merrill, with her unfaltering knack for Dalish improbabilities, that understanding of the Dread Wolf’s acts of adventure and mischief, might recognize the truth about them—was already nothing more than a pale reflection of itself, cast against murky water. If only she had known. If only, with those enormous Dalish eyes—and a little bit of help from her diabolical blood magic—she’d look straight through Anders into the heart of him, to understand he wasn’t the right man.

She didn’t. And, since everyone was depending on him so very much, Anders didn’t have the heart to set them all straight, considering how far they’d gone to find him.

As much as he’d tried, everyone seemed to take the truth as understandable metaphor, when in fact _I’m not the man you think I am_ was more than a theoretical statement about change and injury and slavery in the Tevinter Imperium. For once, he wasn’t trying to be coy. But the damn statement refused to come out as purely literal.

At least there was one thing of which Anders could be certain: who he _wasn’t_ , rather than who he _was_

Well—that, and Fenris’s innate sense of timing, his ability to scoff into any pregnant silence. Which he did, quietly, making Anders feel grateful, and also just a little bit fond.

‘Look,’ Anders began, realizing everyone _was_ looking already, staring his way. Waiting for a rousing speech, the voice of Justice, his sonorous tones forged deep in the bellows of the Fade. Something moving, a call to action—a call to staffs, if not arms.

The act of knowing who you weren’t was far more centralizing than the act of knowing what you couldn’t say. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

But, as it turned out, nothing had to. Because, in this crowd, there was always some pertinent interruption.

‘Would you look what the nug dragged in,’ Varric said from over by the secret doorway, amidst a great big pile of barrels. Anders was relieved to see the glint of Feynriel’s staff-light off Bianca’s unmistakable metalwork—he wondered if Isabela was occasionally very jealous, or if Bianca was jealous, or if they got along swimmingly, a willing and unpredictable threesome—before he was less relieved to see the front part that shot all the cross-bolts trained against Hawke’s back.

Hawke held up his hands in defeat, and also in an amiable shrug; beneath that, he studied them all, their faces, those he recognized and those he didn’t. He stopped when he saw Fenris, and a tight look of worry—something he probably didn’t mean to show, but it was late, and the circumstances rapidly unraveling—played like a shadow over his weather-worn features.

‘Having a party without me, Fenris?’ he said. ‘And you invited Varric and Isabela before inviting _me_? I may be undefeated in the ring, but something like that—it hurts a man, you see. No matter how strong he prides himself on being.’

‘Found him prowling around outside,’ Varric added, nudging Hawke deeper in. Warehouse walls weren’t all that thick, though Anders couldn’t imagine templars clanking through the dockyard looking for signs of trouble in _every_ empty stockroom stinking of sea-salt and sun-baked fish. ‘Figured he came looking for his friend. Fenris,’ Varric nodded, with a tip of his head. ‘No offense, Hawke. Just can’t have you blowing this deal. Resistance efforts don’t usually pay well, but every now and then, an exception is made’

‘None taken,’ Hawke said amiably. ‘Varric, if I’d known from the start you were this interesting, I might have actually invited you to dinner more often.’

‘Maybe next time,’ Varric suggested.

Hawke shrugged again. ‘If there is a next time. If you don’t decide to kill me.’

‘If you don’t kill me first,’ Varric agreed.

Anders pinched his nose between his thumb and forefinger. It was the whole gang, together again, more or less, with a few characters noticeably missing, a few others switched in for them instead. Anders’s greatest failures, his very _best_ triumphs—all his closest friendships and most interesting rivalries—packed together in one room like little fish in oil and brine.

Needless to say, amidst the turmoil of everything else, it was overwhelming.

‘Anders,’ Karl said, noticing him swaying on his feet, just as Fenris put a hand beneath his elbow to steady him.

The main trouble wasn’t what it seemed—none of the grand gestures, but rather such a constant, hearty dose of subtlety. Anders could take it in small doses, but so much of it all at once threatened to drown out his _own_ feelings, which were currently proving to be tentative at best.

‘I can’t believe _this_ lot took you prisoner, Fenris,’ Hawke added, as though the firing end of a deadly weapon _wasn’t_ currently pressed against the small of his back, ready to loose its bolts the moment he proved just a fraction too annoying. Which, it seemed, he was dead-set on doing, _dead_ being the operative word in this equation.

Anders supposed it was all his fault, a gargantuan self-importance that really couldn’t be helped at this point. He’d changed the world. These were his consequences. Even without Justice, he’d always be the one who had to live with them.

He wondered if they were for better or worse, and what kind of spirit _that_ would prove to be. How he would change it; how it would change him. Even if it didn’t have a voice, one that spoke in so many words, it had a feeling, a constant one, and there was no ritual for sundering that burden from his flesh or from the back of his mind. No matter what books Hawke found, no matter what ancient Dalish words of power Merrill knew how to recite, no matter the wealth of lyrium buried in Fenris’s skin.

But Fenris’s fingers were warm against his arm, through a mended rip in the sleeve of his coat. He leaned against it, and found there was support there, waiting for him.

Fenris didn’t complain. He knew Anders didn’t need him to bear everything.

Just a _little bit_ of everything was enough.

‘Look,’ Anders said again, louder this time. And, this time, everyone _finally_ listened. ‘We’d all be much better off working together, don’t you think? It seems to me that everyone here’s a very clever person in his—or her—own right,’ Isabela chose that precise moment to preen, clearly enjoying the fact that she no longer had to play _just_ the indulgent wife for an audience, ‘and you have to admit—no matter where your personal allegiance lies, there’s _something_ rotten about the state of the Imperium.’ Anders didn’t pause to let that sink in. Timing was one thing; what he needed was momentum. ‘You lot haven’t made things any better—you’ve just reversed it, haven’t you? This can’t be what the Divine had in mind, and if it _was_ , then…well, then she’s a monster. Mages deserve their freedom—but so does _everyone._ Elves,’ Anders’s eyes passed over Merrill and Feynriel; Fenris, behind him, made no move at all, ‘humans _without_ magic,’ he looked toward Hawke and Isabela next, although Hawke looked away, perhaps remembering all too keenly the Imperium of old, when he was still a gladiator, ‘and probably _especially_ dwarves. …You know, I still can’t work out what you’re doing here, Varric.’

‘I’ve got my reasons,’ Varric said, shifting with Bianca to peer around Hawke’s back. ‘Found a little something in the Deep Roads—years back, now. After a while, the Imperium seemed like the best place to find out what it was for.’

It was a vague answer to a personal question. Probably more than Anders deserved, considering he was all but a stranger to the dwarf. Varric didn’t know that Anders had been on the very Deep Roads expedition that had netted him the lyrium idol once; Anders wondered what had become of it in subsequent years, then shelved the question for its relative unimportance. ‘What I mean is— No, all I’m saying is, it’s up to _us_ to set things right now, isn’t it? No one’s going to do it for us—and quite frankly, no one would succeed the way I know we can. We’re talented. We work well together. I know every single one of you, and I _know_ we’re meant to do exactly that. Don’t ask me how. It doesn’t even matter. The fact is that I do, and I’m right, for once, so… Believe me. Sometimes, respect is all you need to understand someone. Sometimes, that understanding actually gets things done.’

Fenris’s fingers tightened around his elbow gently, as a caution. Anders felt the touch ground him, reminding him not to become _too_ carried away. After all, he didn’t want to lose the fragile trust he was attempting, like a child in the sand, to build.

He turned toward Karl and Merrill, pretending he felt convincing, instead of tired and deeply off-kilter. With Fenris standing calmly at his side, it was a simpler ruse. Not simple—but simpler. ‘You _need_ swordsmen,’ Anders concluded. ‘You practically said it yourself. And Hawke and Fenris—they’re the best. You know that. The cause won’t be able to get by with rogues and mages forever, not once you get the templars’ attention. And by kidnapping me—well, you’ve probably already done that. You just don’t know it yet. Or _they_ don’t know it yet. But everyone’s going to know it soon enough.’

Karl sighed into the silence that followed, lifting a hand to smooth out the deepening lines in his forehead. ‘What did I tell you?’ he said at last. ‘He’s _good._ ’

‘It wasn’t bad, I suppose,’ Feynriel admitted, still holding his staff-light steady. ‘I’ve heard _worse_ speeches, anyway.’

‘Hang on,’ Hawke said, managing to interrupt while continuing to sound completely relaxed. ‘Is this a kidnapping or a recruitment? I don’t recall pledging my sword to anyone’s cause—and I’m fairly certain I left the lamps on in my estate. I should probably go back and see to those.’

‘You _want_ to help,’ Fenris of all people said, speaking up to take Anders’s part. ‘This effort at dissembling is embarrassing us all.’

‘Don’t hold back, Fenris,’ Hawke muttered. ‘Tell me how you _really_ feel.’

‘Oh, _Hawke,_ ’ Isabela said, with a fond roll of her eyes. ‘You know we’d be glad to have you. Don’t act like you’re so thrilled with the way things have been going around here.’

‘I didn’t know mages were so important to you, Isabela,’ Hawke said.

‘ _Freedom_ is important to me,’ Isabela corrected. ‘It’s one of my many loveable quirks.’

‘Damn right,’ Varric agreed. ‘Well, that and your positively _enormous_ —’

‘We need to leave the Imperium,’ Anders said, before the two lovebirds could find the sardines and start eating them off one another. Maybe he was getting carried away, and maybe both he and Fenris knew it, but there was nothing for either of them here—nothing for _anyone_ , really. If they could just get the people they knew out of such a poisonous environment, get them together where they belonged, then maybe Anders would be able to feel like he’d done some good for this _other_ Anders, after all. And maybe some good for himself. And possibly, some good for everyone. ‘You can’t plan a revolution in the capital, it’s too—’

‘Ostentatious?’ Isabela supplied.

‘Dangerous?’ Varric observed.

‘Exciting?’ Merrill asked.

‘Yes,’ Anders replied. ‘Precisely that.’

Now, all eyes were on him, watching, and _trusting_ in his counsel. The real Anders must have done _something_ right in order to maintain this kind of reputation—even if the rest had been so very wrong. And if he ever made it back where he belonged, he’d be able to pick up where he’d left off, in a far better position to make right on _his_ end of things.

Perhaps he’d just been biding his time all along, waiting for the opportune moment. If such a thing was even possible. Anders didn’t know anymore, didn’t want to begin the arduous process of _wagering a guess_.

‘He’ll hunt us, you know,’ Hawke said. He’d finally stepped away from Varric’s crossbow, and was now pretending to examine his fingernails for dirt. ‘Prince I’m-Andraste-With-my-Own-Face-Guarding-my-Crotch. He tends to take these things rather personally. His slaves. His cause. _His_ Exalted March.’

‘Then we will simply _not_ have to let him catch up with us,’ Fenris said.

So many people seemed to be under the misimpression that Anders was the one who had a way with words. But he wasn’t. Fenris was, and Anders knew it because the art of being simple was so much more difficult than the art of being complicated.

Fenris was both. Surely that warranted some kind of special recognition, perhaps an award.

‘Well,’ Hawke said. ‘Villa life didn’t really suit me, to be perfectly honest with you.’

‘And it might not be terrible if the opposition saw such an obvious defection,’ Karl agreed. He’d always been so wickedly smart, Anders remembered, allowing a flush of awe from childhood to return—one of the many emotions that currently, thoroughly, filled him up from the very bottom to the very top.

It might have been the wrong thing to do, meddling in other people’s lives without a thought for the consequences. Then again, that was simply what Anders did, no matter where he was, no matter who was with him. Little things, big things—at least this time he knew it was right, that Hawke needed everyone else and everyone else needed Hawke. Mage or no, this revolution—if it could even be called that, at this stage—was just as much his as it was Anders’s. And Fenris, and Isabela, and Merrill, and Varric—everyone who’d come along with them for the ride, not counting Aveline, whose duty was always to keep the peace. Someone had to stay behind in Kirkwall to clean things up. That was probably where she was right now, warding off a sneeze or a shiver as Anders thought about her, brief, but with an acute focus.

Ranged before him now were his friends, both past and present. Behind him was…not a friend, but certainly a part of his future; Fenris shifted, observing something on the floor beneath his feet.

‘You know, Fenris, if you wore boots,’ Anders pointed out, ‘or really, shoes of any kind, it wouldn’t matter quite so much when you stepped in something sticky.’

‘ _You_ are missing a boot yourself,’ Fenris replied.

Anders wiggled his stockinged toes. He’d stepped in something sticky, too. Fenris and him, sharing the same salty, black puddle, whatever it was seeping through the fabric of Anders’s sock.

Anders sighed.

Then, from a distance, Anders heard a banging on the warehouse walls, a sharp ‘Open up!’ that was far too crisp to be a concerned dockhand. Templars, probably; it was always templars, interrupting his life, interrupting his personal revelations and, perhaps most importantly, his personal moments. Feynriel extinguished the light and Varric cocked his bow; Karl lifted his staff and Hawke dropped into a crouch. Merrill lifted one hand; Anders felt, rather than heard, the song of the air as its pressure changed, a cloaking spell that rose up from the earth and encircled all of them, together.

Fenris drew closer to Anders beneath the dome of Merrill’s magic. The rush of lyrium was strong, even stronger when Anders turned his face toward him. It reminded him of something—a place in time, still not too long ago now—and Anders only had a moment to panic, Merrill chanting low and steady in ancient elvhen beside them, before the rushing of blood and impulse howled through his ears, dragging him down to the bottom of some deep, dark well.

That was the last thing Anders remembered, alongside Fenris’s startled shout.

*

When he woke, it honestly came as a surprise to him. Two eyes, blinking to accustom themselves to the bright sunlight, but at least he _was_ awake—and instinctively, he knew that deserved special mention. Awake, and not blind, but there was still room for panic.

The hay was the first thing he noticed—first _and_ second thing. It was difficult _not_ to, what with it being everywhere, prickling his unmentionables, poking its way into every conceivable inch of bare skin. Anders ran his fingers against it, listening to the whisper it made against his skin. His hands were trembling with nerves.

‘Well,’ Varric said. ‘Look who decided to wake up. It’s about damn time, too. You know, Blondie, you had some of us worried for a while there.’

Anders blinked. He was on his back; the ceiling above him was thatched, but there were a few holes in it here and there. He could smell dirt, the sunlight on the dry hay; he could see dust-motes floating in the particularly bright shafts as they filtered down from the roof. He knew this sort of scene, personally, intimately, without fail—from years spent in abandoned barns, or not-so-abandoned ones.

‘Varric,’ Anders said, his voice sounding incredibly hoarse. ‘Just tell me one thing.’

‘I’ll give it my best shot to oblige you,’ Varric replied. ‘Just try not to ask one of the hard questions this early, if you can help it.’

Anders licked his lips, which were cracked and dry. So far, everything was in working order, though he wasn’t ready for movement just yet. ‘Are you married to Isabela?’ he asked instead.

A short silence followed. He could hear, _feel_ Varric shifting, ever-so-slightly; he wasn’t looking Varric’s way, grounded simply by the familiar sound of his voice, but he knew this pause so well, enough to imagine Varric lifting his hand to his chin, rubbing at his jaw with a blunt thumb, trying to decide if everyone he knew was absolutely _crazy_ —then remembering, _of course they were_ , and that was why he was so fond of them.

‘Now, Blondie,’ Varric said at last. ‘You _know_ I’ve tried. But there are some women you can’t hold onto like that. They come and they go, just like the tide.’

‘Well, in any case,’ Anders told him, closing his eyes with relief, ‘you two make a lovely couple.’

‘Not in front of Bianca,’ Varric warned.

Realization shot through Anders like an well-timed arrow from a prince’s Starkhaven bow, and he sat up straight in the hay, sending a few random stalks flying in a cloud around him. ‘Fenris—?’ The question dropped from his lips before he could think better of it.

If they weren’t together, then one of them was alone.

That wasn’t how it was supposed to work. Anders had as good as promised it wouldn’t happen anymore, not in so many words—but with his body, with his hands, with his lips on skin.

Wordlessly, Varric pointed to something in the distance, another dark body slumbering in the hay. The look on his broad face was priceless—Anders felt a stirring of something he hadn’t felt in a long time, the urge to _laugh_ —not because he was horrified, but because something was actually funny.

‘Over there,’ Varric added. ‘The others are out scouting our next great destination, of course.’ He hesitated, heavy brow and golden brows drawing sharply down. ‘You feeling all right, Blondie? Not any—I don’t know— _crazier_ than usual? Hopelessly broken by a Dalish blood magic ritual?’

‘I’m fine,’ Anders said, smoothing straw from his hair with shaking fingers. He looked over to Fenris, just to check, just to make sure, then back toward Varric. ‘…Do you really think I’ll be different now? I mean—changed _forever?_ ’

Varric shrugged. Anders reveled in even that small gesture, the familiar sight of his tailored leather coat, the weather-worn tips of his boots. All his brazen chest hair. ‘People change, Blondie. Some people do it with a lot more fire and brimstone than others, or they make _big_ differences instead of little ones, but it’s all the same basic prospect. A story wouldn’t be any good if all the characters stayed the same from start to finish, now would it?’

Anders nodded, already rising from the barn floor. He looked _and_ smelled as if he’d just spent the last week sleeping under a dying cow, but none of that seemed to matter much _now_. He needed to know if he _was_ the only one who’d changed in the time since Merrill’s ritual—perhaps the whole thing had been the product of his fevered imagination, a very complex, very meaningful dream.

Although why Anders would choose to dream about _that_ —instead of eternal taprooms and naughty bar wenches—he couldn’t imagine.

Varric cleared his throat, nobly stepping out of the way, and pretending not to notice the way Anders immediately rushed to Fenris’s side. Anders would definitely catch an interrogation for that behavior later, but it wouldn’t matter so long as Fenris remembered all the same things he did.

And if he didn’t, Anders was about to have a fist through his heart in the most unexpected way.

The straw was slippery beneath his knees as he knelt, unable to bear the burden of uncertainty any longer. As always, he hesitated at the last moment, hovering over Fenris’s prone form. He’d thrown an armored arm over his eyes to block out the encroaching sunlight, but his fingers twitched, coming together in a fist when Anders drew closer.

He always knew when someone was watching him sleep.

Fenris shifted slowly, moving like a sun-drenched cat who’d had its afternoon nap interrupted. His arm fell to one side, revealing a face creased with sleep and hay.

Anders leaned down helplessly, picking off a stray stalk that clung to his cheek; then, sharp talons closed around his wrist, and Fenris rolled to look up at him.

There was an Exalted March happening inside Anders’s ribcage, hundreds of Orlesian hoofbeats pounding out an unsteady rhythm. He was certain that Fenris could hear it from where he lay; no doubt _Varric_ could hear it clear across the barn, pretending he wasn’t paying close attention.

‘Mage,’ Fenris said. He licked his lips, a fraction of a moment spent on hesitation, before tugging Anders closer to examine his wrist, the stretch of his sleeve from forearm up to his elbow.

Anders swallowed, attempting to keep his throat from swelling shut. Finally, Fenris rubbed his thumb against the hard bone of Anders’s elbow, touch rising to Anders’s upper arm. Anders felt dizzy, then realized it was because he’d been holding his breath all this time, never advisable for one’s health.

Fenris scoffed. ‘All that work…and now your coat has no holes in it at all.’

Anders gave a little giggle, then slumped down into the hay, boneless with relief. He knew Varric was probably watching, knew the others might arrive at any moment. They’d wonder what had happened; they’d never understand how much had changed.

Despite losing everything—despite being wrong about a great _many_ things, and right about a few others—Anders had managed to end up with the one thing he’d always wanted, beneath everything else he’d thought he should.

If he could make Fenris feel even a fraction as lucky as he did in that moment, then he could consider this new chapter in his life well-spent.

‘Oh,’ Anders said, staring up at the uneven thatching. ‘I’m sure we’ll be tearing it again soon.’


End file.
